


Kyoshi: Swan Song

by Skyler



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra, Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/F, F/M, Flashbacks, Gen, Multi, Polyamory, Present Tense
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-22
Updated: 2017-10-29
Packaged: 2018-05-02 12:44:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 43
Words: 172,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5248682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skyler/pseuds/Skyler
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fire. Air. Water. Earth. For thousands of years, the Avatar has kept the peace of the world, born into the four nations following the rise and fall of the seasons. Now, with the world ever ready to fall out of balance, the mantle falls to a young woman from southern Chikyu, the Earth Kingdom. Her name is Kyoshi.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Beginnings

**Author's Note:**

> (Avatar Kyoshi, art by [plastic-pipes](http://plastic-pipes.tumblr.com)) 

Being manifested is always a uniquely disorienting experience, although it’s been a while. I’m outside a temple at sundown on what feels like a mild winter day. A quick glance around tells me I’m on an island, but that doesn’t make sense at first. The temple is of Air Nomad design, but new, and certainly not up on a mountain or under a cliff face. Oh, of course. It’s the new one. Not a proper temple, but a little oasis built over the bay, a good distance from the bustle of the new city across the water. I’m not sure which I would’ve preferred, truth be told. Aang’s little sanctuary is tranquil enough, but cities have their own frenetic appeal.

“Oh wow, Avatar Kyoshi…I can’t believe that actually worked!”

The excited shout snaps me back to the woman sitting in front of me. Of course. Ever since getting back from the South Pole, she’s been all too happy to make up for lost time and flex the Avatar spirit. A small smile plays at my lips. Her energy is infectious sometimes.

“Avatar Korra. How may I be of service?” I ask, working myself out of the lotus position I’ve manifested in. Cross-legged, much better.

“I actually just wanted to see if I could get you out here,” she says with no small amount of sheepishness, rubbing the back of her neck with a nervous smile. “I’ve been out restoring bending all day, and now Tenzin thinks I’m running through airbending forms since I can actually do them properly now.”

That explains the Bagua circle we’re sitting in, then. “Airbending is especially challenging. Your training should come first.”

With some small sorrow, I let myself start to fall back into the void. The physical world is nice, but I’ve spent more time in it than any one person should. “But—but you’re my favorite Avatar!”

“Oh?” I hold on a bit tighter. Roku never seemed interested in seeking out my counsel, and Aang focused on Yangchen. Hearing something like that sends a pleasant flutter running through my heart.

“Yeah, of course! I spent years trying to connect and talk to you! My parents used to tell me stories about all the Avatars and they’d always save yours for last because they knew I liked them the best. And then the White Lotus only had one book with one little chapter about you! It only talked about Kyoshi Island and the Dai Li.”

“I see.” She knows so little. They  _all_  know so little, I imagine. “Then it neglected a great deal. And I’m sure what was there was none too accurate, even about those things. Reading and writing were much less common in my time, and oral stories have a way of…changing, over the years.”

“Then could I hear the  _real_  story, straight from the source?” she asks, leaning forward eagerly with a slight crook to her smile. “There’s so much we don’t know about your life. Even the libraries here have barely anything about you.”

Rei did a much better job of keeping things suppressed than I might have thought possible. Still, it might be nice to sit and talk for a while and fill in the gaps for this young woman who has all the weight and troubles of the world on her shoulders. I can do that much for her, but so much of it is still happily buried, and I had never thought to unearth it again. “I doubt that the legend lives up to the reality. You wouldn’t rather hear about Kuruk? The last Water Tribe Avatar before you?”

Korra rolls her eyes. “Yeah, I’m fascinated by the guy who did nothing but lose his fiancée and then got himself killed.”

I can hear Kuruk protesting in the back of my mind, but I close him out as I always have. “Parts of my story and his are linked, hearing about me means hearing about him. He was the cause of no small trouble for me, but some happiness, too…very well. It is a long story, sometimes unpleasant. I never thought of myself as a hero. I had a long time to accumulate regrets, but if you want to hear it, then I want to be able to tell the whole story, unpleasantness and all.”

She nods and leans back on her hands, dropping any pretense of meditating. “Let’s do it.”

⁂

The punch landed square on my jaw, sending a spray of bright red blood to the floor as the crowd cheered. It wasn’t my blood, of course. It wasn’t even human. The little bits of frozen chicken blood they had us put in our mouths to thaw shone better for a bit more spectacle. I staggered back, half for show and half for real. It was still a damn hard hit, even if Li had softened part of the thick earthen gauntlet he had sent me way. There might have been a tiny bit of my own blood mixed in.

_You were a pro fighter? That’s so cool, I was too!_

_I would prefer not to be interrupted, Korra._

_Oh, sorry._

I bounced back and forth, shifting my weight from foot to foot and staying light while Li took a more rooted stance. That probably would have been my best bet, but earthbending always came easy, proper stance or not. Lucky for me, since I liked being able to sling rocks however I chose. One, two, three disks of what was the floor until an instant before came hurling forward, with the last one grazing my side. The edge went cutting through my kimono, an inch below my chest wraps, and sent a trickle of red down to my waist.

With my free hand, I smeared some dirt into it to stanch the bleeding before sending my counterattack. The other two disks had exploded on the wall behind me, but it was a simple matter to pull them back into solid shapes and fling them back whence they came. I sent them a little faster than I had to, forcing Li to flip out of the way to dodge them since he got me with the third disk. The constant chain of escalating retaliation always took a toll on us and likely wasn’t wise, but the crowd loved it and it kept us from falling into a boring routine. We could take it.

I thrusted my own gauntlet forward and the palm flew out, a little technique of my own design. Li sidestepped and I corrected, reforming the flat bit of stone into a cuff in midair. Oh, he hated the cuff, but the crowd never got tired of it.

His ankle was suddenly latched and utterly at my mercy. I pulled him into the air, bumping the back of his head on the ground for good measure. Li was hanging in the air, showing off a nice little tear in his pants, and I shook him a little to a mix of boos and applause. I didn’t particularly like it either, but it was too visually appealing to leave out of our routine, and his look of indignation was almost worth it by itself. I knew he’d get me back for it eventually.

After a few moments, he broke free, or I at least loosened my grip on the cuff to the point where he could break it in two. He took hold of the pieces and sent them back, though they were easy enough to dodge with a quick spin. The dusty smell of broken earth mingled with the blood and sweat permeating the ring all the while. It was a hazy, heady mix, provoking a playful kind of bloodlust that never failed to whip the crowd into a frenzy.

We exchanged a few more blows, ripping up parts of the floor and walls as we went, but I noticed Li was heavily favoring the ankle I hadn’t grabbed earlier. Had I tightened the cuff too much? We didn’t aim to actually hurt each other—most of the time—and I would’ve gotten an earful for it besides. Either way, he wasn’t stopping, so we went on. Once I had split the ring in half, ripping a tiny canyon down the middle, he yanked up two large sections of the floor to use as missiles. It was a little early for the finale, but that might have been a signal that he was in too much pain to continue.

One turned lengthwise and came flying at me in a tight spiral, and he loosened his grip on it so that I could grab it and send it harmlessly into the wall behind me, shaking the stands and rattling the spectators in their seats.

The second missile came much faster, and without a spiral. I raised the ground under my feet into a slight ramp for some momentum before I went flying into the air and landed on the huge chunk of earth. Keeping my balance on it was a challenge, but I only needed to take two quick steps before another leap.

Even though my height should have limited any real acrobatics, I was only one who could do the move properly. It had always mystified all of us, but it meant that I was the one who got to go soaring over the ring, kimono billowing around me. Almost like airbending, I thought while I produced tiny, imperceptible cracks in my gauntlet. The crowd never noticed that the stone crumbled a bit too easily against flesh, they only liked seeing the dust fly everywhere. I hung for a few seconds, fighting the uncomfortable feeling of my stomach dropping out, before I came down hard—or appeared to, anyway—and let the remains of my gauntlet blow into a fine mist on his shoulder. Li fell to the ground, ‘unconscious.’

The gauntlet might not have really exploded, but the crowd did. Some of them had to know it wasn’t real, but if they did, they helped keep up the façade. As long as it looked like we beat each other senseless, I supposed. I didn’t stick around for the cheering, and no one seemed to notice. They’ve had their fun. With a flick of my wrist, part of the wall swung away, and I disappeared inside.

A shock of pain went through my jaw like fire, reminding me of the hit I took there and the two before it. I had to see what the damage was, even if I wasn’t thrilled at the prospect. The girls  starring in the next fight had already cleared out of the little back room we used to prepare, and I sat in the corner where there was a looking-glass set up beside some cloths and a pail of water. I shrugged my upper body out of the flashy kimono, thickly padded to absorb hits, and took a look at my side. The protective wraps there were frayed a bit, and I unwound them enough that I could dab the blood away. Then slowly, carefully to avoid getting another flash of pain, I wiped away the white paint covering my face.

I was tempted to leave the streaks of red above my eyes, but I cleaned those away too. The worst of it looked to be some swelling and the beginnings of a bruise, and thankfully none of my teeth felt loose. One on the other side was already gone…that had been a long night. I was happy to turn away from the looking-glass and change into my own kimono, a much duller green one. I also undid the braid in my hair before picking up the bag full of my few meager possessions.

Li walked in shortly after, still favoring one side, but otherwise he looked unharmed. There were a few light bruises blotching across his toned arms and stomach, too. He spared a single glance at me and muttered something before pulling out his topknot. We worked well enough together—we had to, we were one of the events almost every night—and although I didn’t have any particular feelings toward him one way or another beyond a little lingering attraction from when we first met, he seemed to hate me. I could hardly fault him for that. I’d hate me too, getting shaken about like a ragdoll over and over.

Tei, the dour little proprietor with a great big gut and the merest aspirations of a beard, strolled in after him. He had won the arena in a match against the last owner, which was how she had acquired it, and so on and so on. There were worse people to work for, even if every other word out of his mouth came with a fine spray of spittle, like his tongue was a little too large for his mouth. He had to reach up a bit to drop my pay into my hand, and waited while I counted the coins before paying Li. I guess trying to slight the people who fought for a living wisely never occurred to him.

“Short match tonight,” he said in that offhand way of his as he paid Li. If he minded, he didn’t make any sign of it. The tickets were sold beforehand, after all.

“I’m not doing the juggling act anymore,” Li growled, throwing a dirty look my way as he spoke. “I’m tired of getting strung up and dangled. I have to ice my ankle every night now.”

“Well, when you come up with something more interesting, you can do that instead.” Tei twirled a coin between his fingers as he slipped out of the changing room. “Sundown, tomorrow.”

We were matched pound for pound and he was shorter than me by at least a head, but I still found myself shrinking against the wall under his glare. It was stupid, I could have hit him on the head and been done with it, but I shrank all the same.

“No. More. Dangling.”

He stalked out, and I took a minute to tie my hair back. I was tempted to reapply my face paint, knowing there wasn’t any serious injury, but I only had so much of it and it would smudge in the night. Best to let it be until morning, no matter how uncomfortable it made me to go without it.

The handful of spectators still milling around outside the arena didn’t even spare me a passing glance as I walked by and out of the building. Without the bright clothes and war paint, as Tei liked to call it, I was nearly unrecognizable, which was fine by me. I fixed my bag’s strap across my shoulder and stepped out into the cool autumn night.

Seizhon was a quiet place after dark. The peninsula it was situated on at the extreme south of the Earth Kingdom ruled out any through traffic. Apart from the occasional peddler, royal emissary, or lost fishing trawler, there were very few visitors.

_Where’s Seizhon? I’ve never heard of it._

_It’s part of Kyoshi Island now. Stop interrupting me._

No one had bothered to light the street lamps yet, making it a very dim journey through the back roads. I could feel why after a few moments. It was going to rain soon. Wonderful.

When I rounded the last corner, the owner of the noodle stand I liked was getting ready to close up. I tried to dash across the road to make it, but I lost my balance and only got my rear covered in mud for my trouble. It was my only kimono, so I’d have to wash it out, another fun thing to do. He was amused enough to stay open a few minutes longer, though, and started making my usual order as I picked myself up. I thought I had a rather plain, forgettable face without the paint, but he prided himself on never forgetting a customer or their usual order, and I got the same thing most nights.

“Any tea?” he asked, setting a bowl of noodles and beef broth with a pair of chopsticks in front of me.

I put some of my winnings on the counter for the food, thought about it for a moment, and then added another coin to the stack before pushing it over to him.

He mixed a few leaves of red clover with some water he kept piping hot and set the cup down. I let it steep a bit while he stuck a lemon wedge on the lip. The noodles were saltier than any food has a right to be, but it was cheap and filling, so I happily indulged. I was barely eighteen and still growing—to my displeasure—so whatever food I could scrounge up was fine. Once the tea had cooled to a tolerable level, it went down rough, each mouthful bitter and sharp. Well, I didn’t drink it because it tasted good. It was cheap and it made me feel better.

“Won your fight, didn’t you?” he asked, snuffing the fire that had been keeping the noodle broth warm. It was the first subtle warning that the stand was closing in a few minutes, whether I was finished or not. I took a longer sip of my tea, grimacing as it hit my tongue. I nodded.

“You always get the tea after you win, that’s how I know. Took a great big hit there for your trouble though, didn’t you?”

The wins were decided beforehand with coin flips to keep fans guessing, but it wasn’t inaccurate to say that I won. I gingerly placed a hand on my jaw where a bruise was surely forming, but I didn’t care to pull out my own looking-glass to confirm it. A shrug sufficed, and I packed away the last few mouthfuls before pushing the bowl back. He grunted a goodnight my way and closed the stand, shuttering the front and leaving the street quite a bit darker. That was fine. I’d long since memorized the roads, and I didn’t mind the dark.

Outside the town center, homes and tiny farms formed loose circles, radiating out like ripples in a pond. I passed my house as the rain began to patter down on my head—the house my parents and brothers lived in, anyway. I kept walking. The riverbank was close by, though I had to check my little earthen lean-to there and make sure nothing had nested inside while I was out for the day. Everything looked clear, so I put down my bag and draped my kimono over the roof to let the mud wash out. There was a little soap left, and I worked myself over while I sat in the rain and watched the far-off lightning. A swan on the opposite side of the river was swimming around in search of relief from the weather, so I made a small shelter on the far riverbank that it occupied almost immediately.

With the rain beating down and the soap washed away, I crawled inside and closed up the opening of my lean-to enough to keep the water out and let some air in before pulling in my reasonably clean kimono. There wasn’t anywhere to hang it, so I carefully folded it up to use as a pillow before curling around my bag. My side and face still ached, but fatigue won out, and soon enough I fell into a bout of restless, dreamless sleep.

⁂

“This…isn’t exactly the story I was expecting.”

“And what exactly _were_ you expecting, Korra?” I ask. “Tall tales that spin the truth out of all proportion? Enormous, map-changing battles? Spirit world politics? Romance, painful betrayals?”

“Something like that,” she admits. “I mean, all the stories my parents told me were about you doing stuff like that, kicking ass and saving the world. You haven’t even spoken yet. Why were you homeless? Did anyone know you were the Avatar? Did  _you_  know you were the Avatar?”

Her eagerness to hear all this is refreshing, even if I shudder to remember some parts. “As I said, the legend and the truth are two very different things, and the truth involves some very humble beginnings. Not all of us had three elements mastered at seventeen,” I add with a small grin. She is a truly talented Avatar, even if her confidence wavers between needing bolstering and needing tempering. “We will get to all that, and more. There are still another two centuries or so. You haven’t even met my friends yet, my own…what did Aang’s brother-in-law call it…Team Avatar.”

“You had a team? I do too!”

Yun, Nanuq, Rei, Tiaraq…how painfully familiar their names feel in my mind. I can only hope their spirits found some measure of rest after all this time. Tears begin massing at the corner of my eyes, and I need to change the subject. “The brothers and the nonbender woman, yes. They drift through your mind quite often.”

A long, low bell chimes nearby, and Korra’s attention falters for the first time all evening. “Oh, dinner,” she says, putting a hand over her stomach. “I’m not sure how to de-manifest you, so…”

Her innocence is charming, and I have to laugh a bit at it. Still so much to learn. “I can take care of that. Go and eat. We can continue whenever you like, you only need summon me—”

Korra stands up and almost jumps into an embrace. It’s fortunate that we manifest in a solid form, otherwise she would become very familiar with the stone underneath us. She puts her arms around me, resting her head in the crook of my shoulder. I want to recoil, probably an artifact of discussing my early life, but from a sitting position I can only do so much. The bit of contact causes guilt and enjoyment in equal measure, and she only moves away once I pat her on the back. “That’s right, you like your hugs.”

“I’ll be back tomorrow, all right?”

I nod, and fade away.


	2. Fire

“I see you’ve brought friends. Not practicing your airbending tonight either, Korra?”

She slumps a bit, and the boy with a hand on her shoulder nods before Korra looks at him. If he agrees, he says nothing. Her lover, I remember, even if I wish I didn’t. Sometimes I wish our access to her sensorium was less unfiltered. The other two, his brother and the nonbender woman, only sit there with their mouths hanging dumbly open.

“This is an Avatar history lesson, so it has to be more important, right? I can practice airbending anytime, but this is the only night we were all able to get here,” Korra says before brightening back up. “But yeah, these are my friends! Mako, Bolin, and Asami. My own Team Avatar.”

They all give me small nods. “Very well. You’ve told them not to interrupt me?”

“Oh, right…don’t interrupt her, guys.”

⁂

The sharp stench of sweat filled the cool air, choking in its thickness as we finished our work for the day. Another new house stood finished, replacing the wooden one that had been in its place that morning. The family living there looked relieved, probably because we had to clear them out with nowhere else to go and they thought we wouldn’t finish by the end of the day. None of us were entirely sure why the mayor wanted all the houses replaced, or what he could want all the wood for, but it was good money, so the earthbenders split into teams to turn the simple plans into reality.

Dismantling the houses in such a way that the wood stayed usable took the most time, going well past lunch simply because we couldn’t bend it. We might have been able to work faster if our foreman, the mayor’s obnoxious little son, ever did more than sit nearby and shout directions. Actually putting up the new house was mostly rote by then, since the plans were all identical. There was a large room with two smaller rooms on the first floor, and two rooms of equal size on the second with supports throughout. When we finished, a few cute firebender girls who also worked at the arena sometimes came in to seal up any cracks, but lately all they did was check the work. We had refined our process after three weeks of doing the same thing over and over.

_I thought you said she was a fighter._

_Do you understand how to sit quietly and not interrupt, firebender?_

Some of the workers stayed behind to flirt with the girls or pick up an extra hour helping the family move their things back in. I would have too, if I’d had the time. Sunset was soon, and I needed to get back to the town center. All I had were a few chestnuts left over from lunch, and I scarfed them down three at a time as I walked back. A little overripe and not as sweet as they could have been, but I had to eat something and there wasn’t time to stop for anything else. I wasn’t sure how many hits I’d be taking that night either, so a mostly empty stomach couldn’t hurt.

There were plenty of people already milling around the arena, looking down into the sunken ring where we fought. Two children were using it to imitate earthbending, picking up some of the lighter disks scattered around and flinging them into the walls. I was early, and I sat in the stands for a few minutes while I finished off my chestnuts, happy to remain unrecognized. Fighting was…well, I was good at it. I liked fighting, I liked the blood and the freneticism, but not the showboating or adulation that went along with it. I had the proper physicality, and the pageantry meant it didn’t take too great a toll on my body. I was usually sorer from growing than anything Li could throw at me. Speaking of which…

Li came sauntering in, all too happy to be swarmed by his fans. They had all arrived by then since he was in the main event. I could have sworn he sustained himself on the attention rather than food. His entrance was my cue to start getting ready. The children down in the ring climbed back up to the stands, and while one of them ran over to see Li, the other stayed rooted in place and looked at me as I stood up.

“Wow, you’re tall,” she said, his voice seized by some innocent awe. There wasn’t any malice in it, no thinly veiled derision, only fascinated curiosity. It was a welcome change. Maybe because we both looked a little funny, me with my height, her with the big blotchy birthmark all over her neck and cheek. I gave her a small, conspiratorial smile and ruffled her hair before disappearing into the back rooms.

If I could have applied the face paint around my eyes without using the looking-glass, I would have, but I liked having a sharp division between the red and white. Getting it symmetrical was as much of a challenge as going three rounds in a fight where all of my strikes had to be at least partial feints, but I loved the effect it created. It was a fierce, striking image, and I had come to feel more like me when I had it on than when I didn’t. Of course, it was an artifice, and a garish one at that, but with it I was sure-footed. With it I could rip down a mountain. I wasn’t playing the character as much as the character was playing me, as strange as the thought seemed.

I was almost done braiding up my hair by the time Li came in to put his things down. I glanced at him in the looking-glass, but he had his back to me while he prepared. That was fine. I saw as I took off my regular kimono that the fresh wraps I had put on that morning were run through with sweat on the sides, under my arms. Should’ve left my chest unwrapped for house-building, I supposed.

The arena’s kimono I used was an ugly mash of color, sewn up and patched so much that I had to wonder if anything remained of the original garment. If it was as ugly then as it was when I had it, then I hoped not. Still, it was comfortable enough with the padding, and it was tailored so that it fit properly. Maybe I complained too much.

Tei’s booming, spittle-ridden voice riled up the crowd outside, as much of a signal as we ever got. I tightened my obi and started to follow Li out, but he turned and stopped me with a finger poking into my chest. He seemed to realize his mistake, because he pulled his hand away before I could grab it and bend his finger back. Both of us grimaced and I stepped away, matching his scowl.

“No more dangling,” he said. If he had been the one paying me, that would’ve been fine. I rather liked getting paid—or, I liked eating, and getting paid was a means to that end—so I would stick to the script we’d been given. Li didn’t wait for a response before turning on his heel and heading out to the ring. All those fans were swelling his head, the arrogant little pissant. I couldn’t believe I ever liked him.

I had to make a circuit through the hallway surrounding the ring to emerge on the other side, and for the first time all day everything didn’t smell like sweat. It was still there, it always was, but mingled with dust and soil and freshly turned stone, all smells that I loved. Maybe it was from living outside, maybe it was the earthbender in me. Either way, I took a deep breath, popped a bit of chicken blood into my mouth, and let the character take over.

The crowd’s reaction to my entrance was much more mixed than Li’s, with boos interspersed among the cheers and clapping. I was supposed to be the villain in the particular story that Tei had cooked up for the evening. Some people had their favorite fighters, some people only wanted to see us beat each other up. The girl from before was in the front row, leaning on the railing and watching with what looked like her brother. I gave her a quick wink before slamming my heel into the ground, sealing up the entryways as if to cut off Li’s escape.

As soon as I finished a last-minute adjustment to the wraps on my hands, the bell rang, and we went at each other. Li sent a ridge at me through the ground, ripping up the floor in a serpentine headed for my feet. I darted around it with a little spin, grabbed two pieces of the ridge and sent them back at high speed. He ducked, and we were off for another night.

_So were there rules about the Avatar fighting, like in pro-bending?_

_I see that you’re just as incapable of not interrupting as your brother._

_Sorry ma’am!_

For the most part, we were allowed to improvise the first two rounds as long as we didn’t beat each other too badly. Choreographing three rounds would have been a nightmare, and it kept things from getting stale. That night, we stayed at a distance for the first round, hurling increasingly large parts of the arena at one another, and the round went to me after I jutted part of the ground up into the backs of his knees. Li came back swinging in the second round though, closing the distance between us and turning it into an out-and-out fistfight.

A hook to my gut sent the chicken blood spraying onto his feet, maybe mixed with some of my own. I got a few retaliatory strikes in, but while I was the better earthbender, Li was smaller, faster, and better in close quarters. His opened his fist for one hit to my chest, grabbing and squeezing hard instead of striking. I managed to drive my foot up between his legs, but I was too doubled over in pain to see his fist coming hard for my cheek, connecting with the bruise he gave me the night before. Some of my face paint wiped off onto his knuckles, and that’s all I saw before falling back and hitting my head on the ground. Well, that and Li playing up the crowd.

Tei was tapping my unbruised cheek as I came to, and I batted his hand away. I hated having them touch me. “Still with me? Come on, up on your giant feet,” he said, stepping back to give me room to stand. There was barely enough time for me to get my balance back before he hopped up to the stands to ring the bell for the third round. Li was a showman, not to mention he was supposed to be the good guy that night, and I knew he won’t come at me until I threw the first stone, so I took a moment to lightly touch my cheek. My fingers met wet, sticky blood, no doubt muddling the bone-white paint there with streaks of crimson. One more thing I would have to get him back for.

I came back fast and I came back hard. Countless little pieces of the wall sheared off and peppered his arms and legs, for show as much as anything. The visually impressive moves didn’t have nearly as much of a punch, but I dug them in harder than was strictly necessary because I wanted them to hurt. Li grabbed the pieces and collapsed them into a single sphere, which he sent soaring back at me. It shattered against the wall where I had been a second earlier, and a shard of it cut deeply into my shoulder, tearing right through my kimono. That was new. I couldn’t get a read on him from across the ring, and I wanted to know if we were fighting for real. I would beat him into a pulp if we were.

_No more dangling._  His words growled through my head. If he wanted me to cooperate, he shouldn’t have groped me and flung a boulder at my face. He was supposed to win that night, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t make him earn it. Even if I broke his ankle, I could take being chewed out for it afterward. With a bit of a flourish, I slammed my fist into the wall, making the whole building tremble while a gauntlet formed around my hand. That always pleased the crowd no matter who did it, and I could see why. Sometimes I watched the other fighters before my events, and occasionally they went at it with the gauntlets. Making them involved shaking the crowd in their seats, thrumming deep through the body like the beat of war drums and stirring up a primal part of the mind.

Never to be outdone, Li nearly brought down the far wall to make his own gauntlet. Always obsessed with making a spectacle. I was in no mood for wasting time, and small flechettes burst from the sides of my glove, spinning around my wrist at dizzying speeds before they went screaming through the air. The flechettes, at least, we had rehearsed. Most of the little needles flew harmlessly past him into the wall, but a few dug into his chest. They were deep enough to cause some bleeding, but shallow enough to keep from doing any real damage. Li fell to one knee, and I wondered for a moment if I burrowed them too deeply that time, but then he forced them out and crushed them in his hand.

We traded a few more blows by rote, falling into a faster version of our usual routine. I was certain that we were really fighting. It was the pattern we used on the nights when he was supposed to win, with me getting the upper hand for a while, and the crowd ate it up. His fans liked the indignation, and the rest of the audience liked the rocks flying around. All the while, I was wondering what to do about dangling Li by his ankle. I was going to do it, of course, but I was debating making it really hurt. It was a humiliating move to be sure, and I couldn’t say that I’d enjoy having it done to me, but Tei liked it, I liked being paid, and Li needed to be knocked down a few notches.

I pulled the palm off my gauntlet and turned it to a sturdy cuff in midair. Li grimaced and did his best to actually sidestep, but he wasn’t nearly fast enough. I made sure to hit his bad ankle and then pulled him up until he was hanging upside down. There was the usual laughter mixed in with the cheers and boos, and I could see Li’s face turning redder and redder. I couldn’t say I didn’t feel a vicious little bit of enjoyment when I saw him like that.

He broke free as usual, but then started tearing up the floor faster than I’d ever seen him go. Large chunks of earth came flying my way, too much for me to bend or dodge. He’d gone completely off-script, not that I should’ve been surprised. Their sharpened edges ripped down to my skin, tearing through the kimono and drawing thin lines of blood all over my sides, legs and arms. It was all I could do to keep from crying out in pain, and normally I could take those kinds of hits. He really was serious, then. Why weren’t they stopping the fight…I saw one more piece of stone coming at me, the largest and fastest one yet. There was no time or space to dodge, and instead I closed my eyes and threw out my bare hand to try and take control of it from him. But I didn’t feel the earth then, only a sudden, blazing heat as fire leapt from my fingertips. It managed to cut down the stone, which skittered harmlessly to my feet.

_Oh yeah, Avatar time!_

_Bro, shut up!_

A deafening silence overtook the area as the crowd fell quiet for the first time, and all I could hear was the sound of my own labored breathing. Li was standing there, dumbstruck, and Tei had fallen over one of the seats trying to get into the ring. I bent fire. I just bent  _fire_.

That wasn’t right.

Murmurs slowly returned, spreading through the crowd much like the fire I had produced. I could hear the word _Avatar_ peppered throughout. That was…no. I wasn’t the Avatar. I  _couldn’t_  be, I—I couldn’t be the Avatar. Everyone was looking at me and I felt their gazes burning, prying, demanding. My gauntlet fell to the floor and I bent away part of the wall, disappearing into the corridor that encircled the ring. I ran, hitting every corner on the way back to the changing room as I started to hyperventilate.

The two cute firebender girls who were on after us were inside, the same ones I worked with on the houses, wrapping up their wrists when I came bursting in. Aiko and Hui both jumped in surprise when I threw the door open and rushed past them, frantic and bleeding everywhere while I stripped off my costume.

“Hey, are you all right?” Aiko asked as I changed into my own clothes. “You two aren’t finished out there already, are you?”

My bag’s strap pressed into my aching shoulder. For a moment I wanted to explain, if only because they were both always so nice to me, but I wasn’t sure I  _could_  explain it. Instead I gave them a panicked look, knocked down part of the back wall, and slipped into the night.

I suddenly couldn’t find my way through the streets I had known so well only hours prior. Nothing seemed familiar, and everyone I passed looked queerly at me. The small remaining reasonable part of my mind knew it was because of the half-ruined face paint and the blood that must have been soaking through my clothes, but the settling fear had already robbed me of any good sense. As far as I knew, everyone I walked by knew what I had done.

_You’re not the Avatar_ , I told myself over and over while I stumbled down the road. _You’re not, you’re not_. Unfortunately, I was at a loss for any other reason why a huge swath of fire had come shooting from my hand. With every repetition of reassurance, puddles rippled, torches burned brighter, and the wind howled with uncommon fierceness. I did my best to shut it out and keep going, all the while hearing voices in unfamiliar languages that I nonetheless understood.

The blood was soaking through my wraps and kimono by the time I got back to the river. The red blotches were dotting my only clothes, which stuck painfully to the open wounds. I yanked it all off and collapsed inside my little lean-to, biting back sobs as my face rubbed in the dirt. Everything in me wanted to collapse the structure right there on top of myself, like I’d thought about doing on so many other nights, but I didn’t have the strength left to do anything but cry.

The swan that came by every so often was back in the little hollow I had bent out for it the night before, looking dimly around for the source of the noise. I stifled myself as best I could, choking back the rest of the tears, and curled up in the soil. Eventually I passed out, plagued by memories that weren’t my own, struck like knives with the thoughts of others pressing in on my mind. All I wanted was for it to stop.

⁂

“Hey, Korra, you didn’t say this was a sad story!”

I can’t tell if the earthbender’s tone is annoyed, confused, or pitying. No matter, he can walk away at any time. Still, a vain part of me is enjoying the growing audience, and I would rather they stay, even for the less pleasant parts. The story is important to understand as a whole.

“There are happier parts,” I say, although I can’t fathom why I feel the need to defend myself to this boy. His inability to stay quiet aside, there’s something oddly endearing about him. More so than his brother, at least. I add dryly, “I might get to them faster if no one felt the need to interrupt me…”

He hunches over, avoiding my gaze, and the nonbender woman puts a hand on his shoulder. The sun is low behind them. “At any rate, you’ve had your story for the evening. Practice your airbending, Korra, and we can pick up another night.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is probably the last chapter that will be bookended by the framing device. They'll still be there, but not every chapter will be buttressed on both sides by Korra and friends.


	3. Run

It was a fitful, restless sleep I awoke from, the kind that left me more exhausted than I had been the night before. Very little light filtered into my lean-to, and sometimes it was hard to tell when it was morning. I sat up, bumping my head on the roof like I did almost every day, and adjusted the collar of my kimono before bending away one of the walls so I could scoot out.

Oh right, the blood. There were red spots all over my kimono, not to mention the mess my body must have been underneath. Well, more of a mess than usual. My face paint had also caked up overnight, and I felt a bit of hardened mud on the side of my neck. In short, I was a mess, and in sore need of a bath. Once I had scrubbed my kimono out and hung it over a tree branch nearby, I stripped out of my wraps and underwear, tied my hair up, and sank into the river. Mindful of the bruise on my cheek, I splashed some water on my face, both to wake myself up and clean away the face paint. I had to work slowly to get around the bruises, drawing the whole process out and extending the already unpleasant time I had to spend exposed.

While I was blowing bubbles from my nose into the water, my recollection of the night before came back like a punch in the face. I nearly choked on the water, coughing and sputtering as I flailed my way over to the riverbank. I had bent fire. I had bent fire the night before and everyone had seen. But I was an  _earthbender_. My parents and my brothers were earthbenders. I threw rocks and dirt around, not fire, and I liked it that way. I built houses and fought in staged battles. But I was a firebender too, apparently. And an airbender and a waterbender, I was sure.

Because I was the  _Avatar_.

The thought made my head spin as I leaned on the riverbank. Spirits save me, I was the Avatar. Some feckless peasant from the smallest village in the Earth Kingdom was the Avatar. I knew I had been born around the same time that Avatar Kuruk died, a little over eighteen years past, but the thought was so preposterous that I couldn’t say it ever crossed my mind. No more than anyone else’s, anyway. Everyone had daydreams about commanding that kind of power, but…they were daydreams, idle thoughts I could retreat into after particularly miserable days.

But I wasn’t in a daydream.

I had to test it. Maybe I took a hit a little too hard in that fight and imagined it all. That was the only hope I could cling to. Once I’d dried myself, put on fresh wraps and fastened my kimono, I crouched down by the riverbank. I drew my hand over the water in slow circles, trying to imitate what I’d seen waterbenders do on the rare occasions when they passed through, and almost fell over in excitement when a thin tendril snaked up in response to the motions of my fingers. My breath caught in my throat. I could bend water, too. All kinds of feelings were surging and pounding through my chest, with fear probably being the strongest.

The water kept following my hand as I stood up, shimmering in the early morning light. It twisted when I moved my fingers and swirled when I flicked my wrist. Waterbending was so starkly different from earthbending, light and loose instead of solid and heavy. It wasn’t bad, really. Different. At least I was still working with a material that I could feel. Maybe that was why firebending had been such a shock. Airbending might’ve felt similar, but I had never seen it done, so I had no forms to imitate. I wondered for a moment if I could simply will it to happen before I realized that I might have been getting ahead of myself. I’d bent two elements in the past hour, three in the past twelve. That was a good enough start.

I had some food left in my lean-to, so I didn’t have to go back into town. Another helping of chestnuts, some berries and a bit of bread wasn’t much, but it was enough to get me through the morning. The swan that nested in the hollow I made for it came swimming over, no doubt attracted by the smell of the food, and watched me until I broke up the bread and tossed some of it into the water. Almost stale, anyway. It greedily ate it up regardless and stayed for a while as I wolfed down my own breakfast. It wasn’t nearly enough, and my stomach growled in protest when I got up to run through my usual forms.

All right, earth. Much easier to work with than water. My toes dug into the soil between blades of grass, and I felt the comforting, familiar heft of stone as I reached out to bend a large rock on the opposite riverbank. It came up off the ground, wavering in place as I cleaved it down the middle and put it back together. Once I’d done that ten times, it fell back down with a shudder, garnering an annoyed sound from the swan. I shrugged and shook my muscles loose before another exercise.

By the time I was finished an hour later, I was awash with energy, so I decided to keep going—but with waterbending. I didn’t know any actual forms for it, but I was sure I could improvise based off what I did know. Carefully, I drew some water up and swirled it around my body, imagining the shapes I wanted it to take an instant before they became reality. Little ridges and valleys appeared on the surface until I finally expanded it into a narrow ring rotating around me. The flow of bent water was a strange thing, moving almost randomly without a current to direct it, and utterly fascinating to watch.

An idea struck me, and I shifted my stance, holding onto the water while pieces of the ground at my feet rose to form another ring, moving perpendicularly to the water. Cracks appeared in the ground as I gripped harder, sending a rumble through the whole riverbank. Seeing two elements at my command was…mesmerizing. Even looking right at it, I still couldn’t believe it was really happening, couldn’t believe I was twisting earth  _and_  water to my will—

Both of which promptly fell to the ground when I saw that I had amassed a bit of a crowd.

Some of the water splashed on my feet and one of the rocks landed on my big toe. They were all staring at me, unmoving, silent, and I felt my face flush the most brilliant shade of red. Fighting with an audience, behind a character with a good deal of face paint and a script, was one thing. Practicing bare-faced in front of a bunch of curious onlookers was quite another. The girl with the birthmark from the arena was there in the front, watching in earnest.

I don’t know how I stayed calm long enough to do it all, but I collapsed my lean-to, grabbed my things, and threw a crude bridge over the water that I shattered as soon as I was on the other side. It was strange, I’d never been on the other side of the river, even after looking at it every day for almost two years. Once I was in the tree line and out of sight, I stopped to pick a pebble out of my heel, put on my boots, and tighten my bag’s strap. I couldn’t stay there. The crowds certainly weren’t going to get any smaller.

So I ran.

I wasn’t sure how far or for how long, but I ran. It couldn’t have been _very_ long, my endurance wasn’t nearly as good as my strength. All I knew was that I was headed southwest…so I thought. There had only been a few occasions when I’d left Seizhon, and for all of those times I’d had a road to guide me. Right then, I was vaguely headed toward the town of Kaiko on the south end of the peninsula, the only real destination for miles around because of its port.

My lungs started crying out after a half hour or so in a dead run, as did the stitch in my side. I slowed to a brisk walk once I finally stumbled onto the road, where people were going to Seizhon. That was strange. No one went to Seizhon. The reason became clear after I heard _Avatar_ in a few conversations while heading the other way. Well, they were going to be sorely disappointed. I did my best not to attract attention, and a little past midday I was walking into Kaiko.

I had seen sketches of places like Omashu and Ba Sing Se, so I knew that Kaiko wasn’t a proper city by any stretch of the imagination. Still, the stark difference it created with Seizhon made me reel a little. Crooked wooden buildings that looked as if they were leaning on one another tilted oppressively over the streets, making them so cramped and closed in that I had to shove up against a wall to make room for passing carts. Merchants on every corner yelled from countless stalls, hawking their wares. The smell was also…something I didn’t know if I could get used to, filth and rotten food along with the stench of something burning. My eyes started to water. I couldn’t imagine what real cities were like if a place as small as Kaiko was such an assault on the senses.

Some money jingled in my pocket, as did the more valuable gold coins sewn into the lining of my kimono. I could have gotten something to eat, but my appetite wasn’t what it had been before running off. More than anything, I wanted to not be there, I wanted to be far away from Seizhon and Kaiko, somewhere I could sit quietly for a while and make sense of everything.

The Southern Air Temple seemed as good a place as any for that.

I’d managed to bend everything else, why not go and try my hand at airbending? Besides which, it was my opposite element, and likely the one I’d need the most help with. I was sure there was a town at the base of the temple on Patola Island, and they must’ve had some kind of trading presence. With any luck, something in Kaiko would be making a stop there.

The only question was how to get to the docks…

Judging by the sun, I was walking south, and that seemed like the right direction. I couldn’t see any maps or street signs, not that they would have been much help to me, and the streets had a nasty habit of winding back on themselves and turning every which way, so staying southbound was as much guesswork as anything else. Everyone I passed rushed by me or was carrying something, so asking for directions wasn’t an option, and I wasn’t sure they’d be meaningful even if I did. The sound of seagulls seemed like my best bet, and I followed their squawking as well as the twisting roads would allow.

The thick smell of salty sea air eventually won out against the stench of hot garbage, and the cramped buildings gave way to more spacious warehouses. Carts pulled by loping ostrich horses moved crates to and fro, while earthbenders unloaded them from cargo ships and the occasional cutter. A crier stood by the timetable at the wharf, and I paused to listen to the ships heading out soon and their stops. He was going maddeningly slowly, but I couldn’t read, so there was little else to do but be patient. Most of the ships were going the wrong way, to Shanbei or Ganan and then toward the eastern coast or some such. Some of their routes swung close to the Eastern Air Temple, but it was a good deal farther than Patola and that stretch of the South Sea was choked with corsairs. Finally he rattled off a ship, _Bianli_ , bound for Hitenno with a stop at Patola, as the next to leave in a few minutes, the last departure for several hours. The Southern Air Temple, then.

_Hitenno?_

_An old name for the Fire Nation, earthbender. And before you ask, Chikyu is the name I knew for the Earth Kingdom._

A scruffy little boy bumped into me, sending me a few steps to the side. “Sorry,” he mumbled as he started to hurry off. He tried to, anyway. His technique needed work. I rolled my eyes and grabbed his wrist, yanking him back to find my coin pouch in his hand. He struggled, but he couldn’t be more than ten or eleven, with the size to match. He only came up to my hip, and I could hold him up and shake him about if I had half a mind to. I had a bit of a soft spot for children, though, so I settled for glaring at him.

“Uh, little help here?” he said.

The three sailors he was running off to stopped leaning on some crates and started heading over. I grabbed my money and put it back in my pocket before shoving the boy away. Base desire for revenge aside, I didn’t want to beat up a little kid. It probably wasn’t his idea anyway, and I doubt the Avatar would do it. Around that point I noticed that the wharf I was on was mostly wood and metal over water, without a bit of stone or earth in sight. I could hold my own in a single fight without anything to bend, but three decently-sized men at once were a problem.

Wait a minute. I was the Avatar, I could bend anything I wanted!

For a brief moment I wished I had tried to practice freezing water earlier, but there was no time like the present to learn. The closest of the three sailors stepped over a gap between two slats of wood, where a tendril of water came screaming up. All right, seemed like I’d gotten the hang of that. I tried to freeze it in midair, but I was a second too late, and it hardened into ice only after striking him between the legs. He faltered and lost his footing, hitting his head on the wharf as he went down. Not exactly what I had intended, but I couldn’t argue with the results.

The other two looked like they were starting to rethink their decision, but they ultimately decided to keep coming. Bad mistake. One of them hoisted their friend to his feet while the other kept advancing on me. I was tempted to try out firebending again, if only to let them know how badly they’d screwed up, but I didn’t want to get swarmed. Waterbending only, then. I could do that.

I almost had the motion for freezing figured out, flicking my wrist up while making a loose fist. It was almost like the technique I used for making ankle cuffs. Another bit of water came up and rested over my hand, where it split into a pair of shards suspended in the air. I didn’t want to cause serious injuries, so I wasn’t sure where I could send the shards to do enough damage so they’d back off. The arms, maybe? Other spots might have caused too much bleeding.

Another whiff of the city cost me my focus and the ice melted, splashing uselessly through my fingers. Not good, I’d have to practice that. In the meantime, the one sailor was still helping his friend up, so it was an evenly matched fight for the moment. I closed the distance to the third sailor in a few quick steps and jammed the heel of my boot into his toes. That part was easy, I had big feet. Using the momentum from that, I flattened my palm and drove it right up into his gut. It was enough to daze him, and I took the opportunity to grab his collar and throw him into a stack of crates and netting.

The earthbender in me wanted to be pragmatic, but the part of me that fought for crowds won out with some showiness. I supposed there was also an airbender, firebender and waterbender in me too, all with different ideas about how to handle things. I grabbed a little more water, flung it at the last sailor’s arm, and pulled it through some nearby rope before freezing it solid. He started hitting uselessly at the ice, trying to free himself, but he’d be stuck there for a while without intervention. The thought crossed my mind to give him a good kick before I saw a ship departing, headed southwest.

I went bounding to the end of the dock, throwing up a stretch of water while I hoped as hard as I could that the ice it froze into would support me. Cracks started appearing when I was halfway along, forcing a long jump that left me dangling off the railing on the side of the ship. Once I swung my leg over the top after several tries, I was able to clamber up and roll myself onto the deck. The distant sound of ice crashing into the water is all I could hear over my own heavy breathing, and when I opened my eyes I saw two older, more grizzled sailors standing over me.

“We’re not taking passengers,” one of them said in a ragged, salt-burned voice. He looked like he hadn’t seen the solid side of a dock in a long time, nothing but wiry muscle for rigging sails and a mat of thin brown hair spilling over his dark Water Tribe skin. “Especially not one going around and knocking heads with the dockhands.”

They both seemed to be of the same mind, but stepped back so I could get to my feet. My very unsteady feet, seeing as how I’d never been on a ship before. The other man, another Water Tribe native with a more impressive gut and a great big beard, changed his tune when I fished the rest of my money out of my kimono and offered it up. “I guess we’re taking one this time.”

“Captain—”

“You see the harm in having another waterbender along?” he asked, taking my coin pouch and counting out the money. He seemed satisfied, and handed it back with only a few copper pieces left inside while he pocketed the rest. “Keep from beating up anyone else and take care of the fishing. Chushi will cook whatever you catch. There’s space in the hold where you can sleep.”

I nodded, and they both went back to the foredeck. It wasn’t a grand ship by any means, I could’ve walked the length of it in twenty good paces and the sails had seen better days. The cargo was supposed to be pottery work, but with the way the ship was listing from side to side, it had to be packed securely to have any hope of arriving intact. Oh well, not my concern.

There was another railing by the helm, and I leaned against it for a while, watching Kaiko shrink into the larger coast around it before fading into nothingness. A knot formed in my stomach, pressing out any nausea from being at sea for the first time. It was the farthest I had ever been from Seizhon, from my home, from my family.

Good riddance.

After an hour or so, the crew had settled into the voyage, and I got only a few curious looks. One of them said it’d be at least a week, maybe a week and a half to Patola to take on supplies and do some trading, and then another two or three to the port of Shei, in the Fire Nation.

I decided it couldn’t hurt to get in the crew’s good graces, and I spent the rest of the afternoon catching fish in bubbles of water and dropping them into a bucket. They left me to my own devices on the starboard side of the deck, and the time passed quickly. It was a few hours until I had enough fish for myself and the eight or nine crew members I’d seen, just about the time to start getting them cooked. Hopefully they’d prefer it to whatever rations they had for the night.

One last glance back was all I allowed myself before descending into the galley. The whole peninsula was gone, impossible to pick out against the small disturbances on the northeastern horizon. I smiled as the ship continued into the vast, empty sea.


	4. Kyoshi

“Not very talkative, are you?”

I looked over at Fei, _Bianli’s_  captain, and wondered if he was making a joke or asking in earnest. Either way, it was a serious understatement. I hadn’t said a single world to anyone on board all week. There’d been no need, I had nothing to add and the crew gave me a respectable berth. I shake my head.

“No, guess you’re not. That’s fine, I like the listeners better.” He leaned on the railing beside me, a little too close for comfort, while I sat at the side of the ship, legs dangling over the edge, to practice my waterbending. It was getting easier once I figured out not grip it so tightly like I did with earth. The water had to be allowed to flow, and only then could it be shaped. It couldn’t be forced or commanded, it had to be suggested. Quite a shift for me. Air and fire were probably similar, but I hadn’t dared to practice those, even when I thought I was alone on the deck. No need for them to believe I was anything but a waterbender with nothing to say.

“We’re going to hit that storm,” Fei said, nodding to a cell of darkened clouds up ahead. We were stuck between cliffs on either side, the result of trying to save time by cutting between two islands on the way to Patola. I pursed my lips and looked at the approaching clouds as I stood, easily rising a head and a half over him, while he continued. “You’ll be able to bail the water with Tobai well enough, but I’d like it better if you could get your eyes glowing and speed us right through it,” he said in an easy, casual way.

My heart jumped into my throat, and I took a step back while he gave me a sidelong glance. “There’s no way you’re Water Tribe, not with those eyes. Might have to stand on my toes to see them properly, but they’re green, I know that. So, you’re an Earth Kingdom waterbender either going to Tochi or the Fire Nation. Everyone from Kaiko with any news could only agree that the Avatar was tall, and here you are, at least a head over my biggest deckhand. You  _are_  the Avatar, aren’t you?”

I chewed lightly on my tongue. Getting asked outright was…not what I intended. I could have covered my skin with the face paint, but there was never anything I could do about my eyes. No amount of paint could make them look any bluer. There was an evenness in his voice bordering on apathy, but also provoking an odd sense of calm. He was at least three times my age, more than old enough to have met the last Avatar, another Water Tribe native. Maybe I wasn’t all that impressive to him. I nodded.

“Thought so. I won’t tell my crew—spirits know they gawk at you more than doing their work as it is. Bail the water and stay out of their way when they’re taking down the sails, understand?”

Another nod.

“Good, you’re not mute  _and_  dumb.”

I was tempted to explain that I was a builder and a fighter, which unfortunately meant that I lacked the prestigious education of a cargo ship captain. He walked off before I could convince myself to do it, barking orders to get everything tied down and secured. The fishing that day had been awful, so I went down to the galley for a few minutes of calm before we hit the storm.

Chushi, the ship’s bony little cook, only looked at me for an instant before putting her focus back on the broth she was cooking. I liked her, she had a mouth that could put the deckhands to shame and a temper to match, and she was an excellent cook with her firebending. She never minded giving me an extra helping or three, either. Probably didn’t want leftovers, fish didn’t keep well. “Come over here and make yourself useful,” she said, laying a knife on a cutting board beside a stack of carrots. “I want to finish this before all hell breaks loose.”

Once I got through the cramped galley to the corner where she was working, I had to bow my head to keep from hitting a beam there and picked up the knife. It was rather dull, probably from being shoved into wood so often, and it took some effort to get it through the stiff carrots. “Thicker,” Chushi said without turning her head from the broth. “It’s a hearty soup. It needs bigger pieces.”

I made the corrections she dictated, and after a few minutes we got into a routine. Once I was done, she stepped to the side so I could tip the cutting board right into the bubbling pot. Whatever else she had in there, it was making a spicy, pungent odor that got my eyes watering. Chushi seemed utterly unaffected while she grumbled. “Go between the islands, save a day on the trip, he says…idiot. Now we’ll be in Patola at least three days for repairs. Fei couldn’t captain a bathtub—”

The whole ship listed under a massive wave, and that was my cue. I whacked the knife into the cutting board, and Chushi went right on cooking while I vaulted my way over the tables to get to the stairs. As soon as I got out onto the deck, a flash of lightning struck one of the cliffs high above us, and in the same breath a clap of thunder split the sky in two. We must have been sailing faster than I thought. Rain began splattering down onto the deck, while the overcast sky had gone dark and malevolent. A droplet fell right into my eye and I doubled over, wildly bending the rain while I blinked it out.

Fei was still shouting orders, barely audible over the storm. It was all I could do to sweep the deck dry over and over to give the deckhands working the sails a drier surface. No matter how fast I bent it away, though, the water came down faster than I could clear, and what didn’t slip through the cracks to the holds below made everything slicker. One of the deckhands slipped in the middle of bringing down the mainsail, landing in such a way that his ankle twisted beneath him, and the wind only barely drowned out his screaming. I reached out and threw all the water off the deck with one massive push to buy us a moment’s reprieve. A rather inappropriate grin tugged at my lips. I was getting better.

Tobai, the first mate who was less than pleased with my initial boarding, came running up from the holds, soaked to the bone. It must have been even worse below deck, but we could focus on that later. He bent all of the water from his clothes, and even though most of it was quickly replaced as the thunder and lightning kept cracking around us, it had to be better than staying drenched. Keeping the deck dry got marginally easier with the two of us working in tandem, him diverting most of the rain and me wiping clear what he didn’t stop. The wind howled in my ears, and the sopping wet end of my braid whipped around into my mouth. I spit it out so as not to distract my hands…and the rain still wasn’t letting up. It was going horizontal in some places when a particularly strong gust blew through, which tossed the ship about like a toy in a bath. The sails were down, and _Bianli_  was at the mercy of the storm.

We might have been forgiven for thinking that the heavens had opened up. So much rain shouldn’t have been possible, and the wind…I hadn’t ever weathered such a storm. It was almost as if the sky itself was angry with us. I couldn’t think about it. Actually, I couldn’t think at all. Everything was getting blocked out and anything more complicated than the rote motions of my body was frustratingly fuzzy. Suddenly I was moving—at least, my body was moving, I wasn’t willing it to go in fast, tight spirals—and the disconcerting feeling of not being alone in my own mind flooded through. I’d been through enough mental anguish, I didn’t need that, too.

The disorientation only lasted a few seconds, after which I found myself in the middle of the deck, holding all the rain at bay in a large dome surrounding the ship. I couldn’t tell whether it was waterbending or airbending, but the pouring rain diverted as if it were striking and rolling down clear glass, so I couldn’t be bothered to care too much right then. Everyone was watching, some dumbstruck, some curious, while Fei gave me a shaky nod from the foredeck. Soreness started to creep into my arms from having them held straight out at my sides, but I didn’t dare move.

Was that the Avatar state? Blacking out and getting pulled along like a puppet on its strings? Awful.

It felt like hours before the rain finally let up, though it might have only been ten minutes or so. Pain had a nasty way of distorting my perception of time. My arms weren’t sore any longer, they hurt. Bad. What started as dull aching in my shoulders became constant, burning pain spreading to my arms, my chest, and my stomach. The feeling in my fingers started to fade by the time we finally got out from under the worst of the storm clouds. A bit of blue sky was all I could see at first, but it was good enough for me. I fell to my knees, catching a few leftover drops of water before I hit my head on the deck.

_That’s what the Avatar state is like, Korra?_

_How is it that you are so profoundly incapable of sitting quietly, Bolin? Do you think I have some reason to lie to you?_

When I came to, there was a low, dull ache in my lower back. I opened my eyes, but all I could see was my own lap and the floor underneath. There was a little towel on the table where my head was resting, and I realized I was back in the galley where Chushi was still cooking, apathetic to the world beyond her kitchen. A relieved sigh shuddered out before I shrank and wrapped my arms around myself. They moved me. They  _touched_  me. I shivered despite the warmth.

Something else, there had to be something else to focus on, I thought as I pulled my kimono tighter. I glanced at the floor again and saw the remains of puddles dotted around. Tobai must have cleared out the hold. Hopefully the cargo wasn’t too damp, since I slept between two of the crates.

“You’re up,” Chushi said as she tossed bits of tofu into the broth. When the last one fell off the flat of her knife, she took a mill of something and ground it furiously into the waiting pot. “Fei’s lucky I don’t go after him with the knife, getting my galley flooded and then making me haul you down here. How am I supposed to feed everyone while I’m doing all that?”

She was the one who moved me, that made it…marginally better. Not by much. I didn’t mind as much when women touched me, but I still minded. The fact that she got me down there at all was impressive. I held my head in my hands and took a few deep breaths to calm myself down while Chushi spooned some broth into a ladle and walked it over to me. “Here, try this. It’ll get you back on your feet, one way or another.”

I put my lips to the ladle and drew in a mouthful, testing the heat before taking the handle and tipping the rest back into my mouth. Whatever spices she added worked well together, scorching my tongue and the insides of my cheeks. My whole mouth puckered while I slapped the table, and Chushi took back her ladle before a fit of coughs seized me.

“So? Good?” she asked. I got a quick nod out before I started hacking up a lung. “I told Fei he wouldn’t regret bringing those peppercorns.”

The rest of the crew might not have shared my appreciation of spicy food, but a bell sounded out from the deck before I could get another spoonful. “Guess they finally saw Patola—”

I was up and moving before she could finish, taking the stairs three at a time until I nearly collided with a deckhand on his way down. Somehow I squeezed past him in the narrow passage and headed up, under the open sky where we were steering toward another island.

But our destination had people, people and flying bison all over the place. I leaned over the railing, trying to take it all in at once. We were heading into the setting sun, starkly framing the small ridges formed by the buildings that made up the port town. There were no other ships at the docks, giving _Bianli_  a wide berth for her approach. Fei and Tobai were at the foredeck while the seafoam splashed and a bison skirted over the mainsail. To think that something so massive could move through the air like that…well. If a creature that weighed as much as fifty people could fly, I was sure I could learn some airbending.

My gaze tracked up from the town of Patola to the mountains that dominated the center of the island. That’s where I was going to learn it, the Southern Air Temple. Its spires thrusted up into the reddened sky like the fingers of a clawed hand, intimidating and strangely inviting all at once. I just had to figure out how to get up there…I could make handholds on the mountainside, of course. But that would take hours, at least until the next morning. Not to mention likely sleeping on an escarpment, and my nightmares made me thrash around in my sleep. There were still a few gold coins sewn into my kimono, that would have to be enough for a bison ride up to the temple—

I shook my head clear. The ship wasn’t even docked yet, I was getting ahead of myself. Some of the deckhands started taking down the secondary sails, leaving only the mainsail and a very harrowed helmsman guiding _Bianli_  into the one dock that could accommodate a ship her size. Two men in saffron and maroon robes were on the dock, holding a gangplank at the ready. They had the hallmark Air Nomad shaved heads, but no tattoos. Members of the laity, then. A few ropes flew out toward the dock and some boys nearby rushed to tie them to empty waiting posts.

The anchor finally dropped, and the mainsail came down while the gangplank clattered onto the deck. My bag didn’t leave my side except for when I sleep, so I had nothing else to grab. Nothing to go back to. I took the gangplank down to the dock, and it was so nice to be back on solid land, even if it was a bunch of wood.

Patola was a far cry from Kaiko. The buildings, apart from being markedly less ramshackle, were spaced farther apart and didn’t share walls. All the streets were wider, despite there being no carts moving along them. Everyone seemed to be carrying things themselves. It smelled much nicer, too…I guessed that the lack of work animals had something to do with that. More importantly, there were bison flying from the far edge of town up toward the temple. Seemed worth a try. When I started for the town proper, though, I felt a hand on my arm. I pulled away and saw Fei there behind me.

“You coming back?” he asked. I took another look at the temple and shook my head. He paused for a moment before digging a few coins from his pocket and offering them. “Can’t charge you for the whole trip, then. Last thing I need is another Avatar hunting me down over a few coppers. Anyway…good luck. I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

So did I.

They wandered off into the town for supplies, and I made a beeline for the western outskirts. Plenty of people were milling about, some of whom were sporting pale blue arrows on their foreheads and arms. No one seemed particularly rushed as they went about their shopping, and an unfamiliar air of friendliness hung over the markets. Despite the crowds, Patola was quiet and oddly peaceful. Even expecting that, it was still a rather shocking change. At least I’d gotten some of my money back. Fei said he didn’t want  _another_  Avatar after him, though. Maybe one day I could ask Kuruk about it.

The streets were laid out much better than Kaiko’s, or at least they didn’t curve back on themselves. I was able to find my way easily enough to the edge of town, where there were a few monks with their alms bowls, waiting for the bison swooping down from the temple. How did something so huge land so softly? The monk in the saddle hopped down to help the others, and I hung back until they were all loaded in.

“Is there something we can do for you?” he asked with a small, neutral smile. “Are you going to the temple?”

At least some of them spoke my language. I hadn’t been sure if anyone so far from the Earth Kingdom would speak Chikyan. I nodded and offered what remained of my money, but he shook his head. “Oh, that’s not necessary. Do you need help getting in the saddle?”

That I could do on my own. I bent a few steps from the ground and hopped in before collapsing them, much to the interest of the monks. I supposed they didn’t meet many earthbenders. None of them said anything, but I busied myself with putting on my face paint to avoid their gazes all the same. I’d been too long without it, anyway. The takeoff was bumpy and I had to pause, but the flight itself was surprisingly smooth, so I could get a nice sharp line between the white and the red around my eyes with the aid of my cracked little looking-glass. It was probably a waste, considering how late in the day it was, but it made me feel better.

One of the fragments of the looking-glass fell out of place, cutting my finger when I tried to grab it on its way down to my lap. I winced and shook my hand to deaden the pain, but all I managed to do was loose some flames from my fingertips. Oops. Every pair of eyes was on me again, and even the monk flying the bison turned around to gawk. Gawk at the freak. At me. I drew my knees up to my chest and tried to imagine myself somewhere else, as someone else.

It was only a short flight to the temple, though I suspected that had to do with them hurrying along after my accidental display. The bison came speeding down near an outbuilding that looked like a stable, skittering along the intricate tilework and beating its tail to stabilize itself. We all went bouncing around in the saddle as it shuddered to a stop, and I got knocked out entirely when it hit one leg on a rock. I landed hard on my side, rolling a few times until I struck one of the temple’s outer walls. The monk who was flying the bison ran over to help me up, but I waved him off and got to my feet myself.

“Ah, you’re—”

“Is everything all right?”

We must have made a great deal of noise, because another monk was dashing out of the temple proper, catching the corner of a wall with his hand to stay steady. No, I realized. It was a woman. She was young, maybe sixteen or seventeen, with a soft expression and large blue eyes. Her black hair was cut short, unlike most the women in the town below. It was…oddly stylish, for a nun. A wooden pendant hung around her neck, and she was short, too—well, shorter than most of the people I had come across. She came up to my chest, and she was much more slender than me. Cute.

I noticed she didn’t have her tattoos, either.

The monk who tried to help me went over and whispered something to the nun in hushed tones, interspersed with some apprehensive pointing at me. Her eyes widened, and then she nodded before taking a small step forward.

“Peng tells me you’re the Avatar,” she said. There was no trepidation in her voice, only curiosity and sweetness, overlaid with a slight accent I couldn’t quite place. I nodded, flicking my fingers on one hand to get a flame going while bending a rock on the ground with the other. Her mouth fell open for a moment before she got a hold of herself.

“Wow. I—we’re honored to have you here, of course. My name is Yun. And you are, my lady…?”

_My lady_ …that was new. Very new. But not unwelcome. She waited with a small smile, tilting her head slightly while I hesitated.

“Kyoshi,” I finally said. It was the name that went along with the face paint, with the character. I’d always liked it better than my own, and I had already left everything else behind. Best I left that, too. “My name is Kyoshi.”


	5. The Southern Air Temple

“ _Ky-o-shi_ ,” she said, drawing it out, like she was playing with the name. It sounded much nicer when she said it, and her smile brightened up. “Kyoshi! I like it. Then you’re from…Chikyu? Fire, air, water, earth, that should be right…all the face paint makes it hard to see the color of your eyes.”

Seizhon was such a small backwater that, apart from the taxes that went to the capital, it was difficult to think of it as part of the Earth Kingdom at all. Still, my eyes were the usual earthbender green, fractured by contrast from the setting sun and the crimson paint around them. I nodded. “Then you’ve mastered firebending already?”

“Not yet. This temple was closer.”

She nodded and offered her hand. A little rush of anxiety washed over me, but I took it anyway, hoping not to offend my new hosts. Yun clasped my wrist and started guiding me into the temple proper. My stride was much longer than hers, and I had to take short, jerky steps to avoid walking into her. She was talking all the while, although I was more concerned with taking in my new surroundings than with listening to her.

The path from the stables opened onto a terrace midway up the temple, with several levels below us and blue-capped spires reaching upward above us. A large rock garden dominated the terrace we were on, with swirling, intricate patterns raked into the sand around the stones. Two young acolytes who were trying to rake in a new pattern stopped their work altogether as we passed by, looking curiously on as their rakes fell into the sand. Beyond them, the rest of the temple that I could see seemed to be carved right into the mountain itself. The smooth walls gave over in some spots to natural cliff faces that extended far beyond the main temple complex, with holes dug out nearby for infant bison and their mothers.

Some of older monks going about the terraces and lighting lamps had pale blue arrows tattooed on their bodies, and they all tried to subtly sneak a glance at me. I had been picking up on minute tells in fights for too long for that to go unnoticed. Well, I was the only one not wearing maroon and saffron, so I did stick out a little. A class of younger novices going through some airbending forms nearby lost whatever focus they had when we went past, and their teacher tried in vain to bring them back. Yun gave them a small wave, but didn’t stop bringing me deeper into the temple. All the while her hand stayed firmly squeezed around mine, and I noticed that my reflex to yank away was diminishing.

I noticed that she was the only nun there, too.

“Thought this was a men’s temple,” I said, skittering behind her down a flight of rough, worn stairs. A candle on the wall nearly grazed my ear.

“It is!”

We were in the temple interior by then, a dimly lit honeycomb of corridors where my head came uncomfortably close to the ceiling in some places. Except for our footsteps, it was very quiet. There were monks going by, but none of them seemed to make any noise. It was eerie, really. “Then why are you here?”

Her step faltered for the first time while her free hand ran shakily through her shorn hair. “Complicated!” she said after a pause, having regained all her exuberance. “I’m liaising for the Azuma temple—sorry, Eastern Air Temple—but it gets so boring here sometimes. It’ll be so nice to finally have another girl around.”

“If you say so…where are we going?”

“To see Abbot Tsung and the rest of the elders,” Yun said, pausing at an intersection before leading me down the right-hand corridor. “It’s a great honor to host an Avatar, and they’ll want to send the proclamations as soon as possible. Plus they get to gloat to the other elders that you picked their temple over the others.”

“How pious of them,” I said dryly. Trade winds and shipping lanes picked the temple as much as anything else, but if they wanted to brag and puff themselves up, it was fine with me. The smell of sandalwood hit me, along with a faint smoky scent. Burning incense. It was bitter, almost to the point of being acrid, and I wrinkled my nose as we continued down the hall and it grew stronger.

“There really isn’t much else for them to do here.”

We stopped at a heavy oaken door painted with an elaborate swirling white triskele, and Yun knocked a few times before pushing it open. There were five squat little men lined up inside on large cushions, all of whom seemed to have left temperance out of their monastic vows. The air was nearly choked with sandalwood smoke, and through it I saw that they all had a dot of darker blue in the arrows on their foreheads. So they were the elders. There was some low chanting until Yun cleared her throat to get their attention, flicking her wrist to discreetly dispel some of the smoke hanging over the room.

“Good evening,” she said with a small bow. I did the same, although it wasn’t much more than dipping my head a bit. They all grumbled at the intrusion in the way old men did, as if the words got gnashed by their remaining teeth on the way out.

The monk in the middle of the line—the abbot, if the white cord hanging around his neck was any indication—huffed and spoke first. “We aren’t putting on a kabuki show, Yun. And you shouldn’t be recruiting villagers for it.”

An almost imperceptible grin tugged at the corners of her mouth, as if she’d wanted him to say that in the dismissive way he did, only for her to turn him on his head. “Abbot Tsung, elders…may I present Her Holiness, Avatar Kyoshi.”

She stepped back to enjoy their widening eyes and smiled at me. It was a tactful recovery on her part, and I grinned back. The abbot stroked the end of his beard while exchanging glances with his fellows. “Yes, well…Kyoshi, was it? We weren’t aware that the Earth Sages had announced the identity of the new Avatar. News may be slow to get here, but something of that importance should have reached us well in advance of you.”

Oh, to hell with a bunch of sages looking sneeringly down from their ivory tower in Omashu. Yun opened her mouth to speak in my defense, but I put a hand up. All the words in the world wouldn’t compare to some practical proof. There was a vase in the corner of the room that the incense was hanging over, filled with water. I drew up a handful, making it weave in between them before bringing it to rest above my palm, freezing it, melting it, and making all manner of shapes with it. Once I’d twisted it into a ring, I tapped my heel against the ground and pulled a piece of the floor into my other hand. There was some excited mumbling while I replaced the water and the stone.

“Satisfied?” I asked.

“That  _is_  hard to argue with,” one of the other monks said.

Abbot Tsung was still fiddling with the tip of his beard. “Indeed. Of course you’re welcome to train here, Your Holiness.” Yun bounced happily from foot to foot while the abbot tugged at his sleeves. “Though you are aware that this is a men’s temple? Mostly,” he added, looking over at Yun.

I shrugged. Somehow I doubted I’d be very distracting on that front.

“Very well,” he said. “Since Yun seems to be the one who stumbled on you, she can be the one to show you around the temple and direct your training.”

“Yes!”

She seemed to realize after a moment that she was much louder than she’d intended when she saw me cock an eyebrow. “I mean…of course, Abbot Tsung. It would be my honor.”

They went back to their meditation without another word, and I had to assume that the matter was settled. How perfunctory. Yun took my hand again—she seemed fond of doing that—and led me back through the maze of corridors connecting the various parts of the temple.

“Did you like flying on the bison? Have you eaten? What part of Chikyu are you from? Does it take long to do that face paint? It’s so lovely! How old are you?”

Her questions came like a volley of arrows, and she only stopped when she had to take a breath. “Eighteen,” I said. “And no, I haven’t eaten since breakfast.”

“Then that’s our first stop! And I’m seventeen, by the way.”

Yun made a sharp turn down a side corridor, pulling me along while she continued with her questions. I was too distracted by the balcony the hall opened onto, and she seemed happy to go on without any input from me. All the lamps across the different terraces had been lit, and each of them glittered like gold in ore that had caught the light. A breeze wove into some hanging chimes, playing soft tunes that seemed to complement the far-off yawns of flying bison.

The open air was also a relief after being strangled with incense, light and cool and sweet. A few deep mouthfuls cleared my head before we disappeared into another corridor, though it was thankfully wider, higher, and smelled like food rather than sandalwood. Teas and spice and broth, much better.

She led me into a large room with several rows of tables occupied by a sea of monks and acolytes, a flood of maroon and saffron that stretched to the far wall. On one side was a long buffet laid out with dozens of plates, and my stomach growled at the sight. Some of the closer monks looked up at us, but most of the rest had their heads down, either in prayers or in their meals. I took a step toward the buffet, but Yun pulled me in the other direction. Her grip was surprisingly strong. Oh, a stage.  _No, no no no no_ …too late.

“Everybody? Everybody?” Yun didn’t seem to be getting their attention, her voice couldn’t carry through the entire hall. Well, I was thankful for that. Not to be deterred, though, she put her thumb and first finger at the sides of her mouth and whistled so loudly that my ears split. That got their attention well enough. Yun smiled and tugged on my hand until I took a step next to her. “That’s better.”

“What are you doing?” I asked through a hiss.

“Hello, everyone,” she said once the room was quiet, paying no mind to my question. “I wanted to let you know that the elders have agreed to allow Avatar Kyoshi to stay here with us. And I get to train her,” she added. The elders weren’t the only ones who liked to gloat.

Murmurs started running through the assembled crowd, murmurs and all of those burning gazes. Like they were boring right through me. I hated it. I knew that I was going to attract attention just by existing and being the Avatar, but she didn’t have to go and seek it out. “Must you?”

“Well, they’re going to find out sooner or later, aren’t they? I thought it’d be nice if you had the chance to introduce yourself first.”

 _You thought wrong_ , I wanted to say, but Yun was already stepping back and letting the remaining focus fall on me. That girl…she might have been cute, but she was painfully sociable. I had to say something. My cheeks were burning, thankfully hidden under my face paint. All right. I could talk to some monks.

“Um…hello,” I said, trying to project to the back of the room. Ugh, my voice always sounded like it was on the verge of breaking. “Like Yun said, my name is Kyoshi.”

It wasn’t anything else anymore, certainly. They were all watching me, looking intently, but they weren’t the same kind of gazes that I got when I was fighting. More curiosity and less bloodlust. “I’m the Earth Kingdom Avatar after Kuruk. Thank you for—for opening your home to me…I’m looking forward to living and training with you.”

I stuttered a few times, but otherwise it seemed acceptable. Yun trailed behind me after I hopped down off the stage and took a deep breath. “You did well!” she said, never mind the fact that I didn’t want to do it at all. I liked having a script, I was no good with improvising. “We can get you something to eat now, if you want.”

“Yeah.”

The buffet was a medley of rice, greens, all manner of sauces and spices, and a very large pile of tofu. Yun was fixing a plate for me when I noticed a conspicuous absence. “Is the meat at another table, or…?”

It was almost possible to hear her stomach turn as she looked over at me. “We’re vegetarians.”

Maybe I should’ve gone to the Fire Nation.

“Oh. Right.” Great. It might not have been clear through my kimono, but I had muscle to maintain. Tofu could do that, but it wasn’t much in the way of flavor.

Yun handed me my plate and led me over to a few empty seats at the closest table. The monks nearby spared me a few passing glances, but ultimately we were left alone. I was grateful for that small courtesy. I went about sampling a bit of everything on my plate, and all the while Yun was firing more questions at me. “So how tall are you? How’d you find out you were the Avatar? How’d you get here? What elements can you bend? No, wait, I saw you bend everything but air already…”

I wasn’t even sure if she was looking for me to answer her, because she seemed happy to go on with or without me. While she was doing that, I took a tentative bite of my tofu bathed in soy sauce.  _Oohh_ …well, at least the sauce made it taste like meat. I decided not to mention that. Unfortunately the tofu was also very bland, so it needed a lot of it. When I looked up, Yun seemed to be waiting for me to respond. “Sorry, what?”

“I said your family must be really proud, right?”

Suddenly I didn’t feel so hungry anymore, and I nudged my plate away. “I don’t want to talk about my family.”

“Oh, all right. Are you all done?”

I nodded.

“Come with me then, I want to show you something.”

She took my hand once more and led me out of the hall. It wasn’t as if I had much of a choice, her grip was surprisingly firm and I would probably have gotten lost in short order without her guiding me. When we reemerged in one of the courtyards, the sun had nearly set, and almost all of the light came from the various lamps and fireflies buzzing around. “You can’t airbend at all, can you?”

“Not yet.”

“Then we’ll take the stairs. Right over here!”

Yun picked up her pace when we came to a narrow set of stairs carved right into the temple wall, going all the way up to the base of one of the spires. An uneasy pit settled in my stomach. I hadn’t ever thought about being afraid of heights, but then, Seizhon was very flat. The sudden verticality was dizzying, to say the least.

I hoped she didn’t notice me bending handholds for myself, but if she did, she said nothing and only continued guiding me upward. Whatever she wanted me to see, I hoped it was still visible by the time we got to the top.

“Right up here,” she said, leading me up yet another flight of stairs. “I’d cover your eyes if I could—”

“Don’t.”

“But you’re too tall for me to reach,” Yun finished, unfazed by my interruption. “And…there!”

She was pointing vaguely west, out over the rest of the island and the last minutes of the sunset. The sky was a beautiful blend of oranges and purples, with the sun nearly vanished beyond another part of the mountain range. We watched as a few birds went soaring, silhouetted in the light while it faded into darkness. “Do you get these kinds of views in the Earth Kingdom?”

“No, nothing like this,” I said, breathless.

Yun grinned and took a step closer to me, wrapping her arm around one of mine. It didn’t bother me that much. “Welcome to the Southern Air Temple, Kyoshi.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sort of an intermediate chapter before we get into airbending training. I thought about tacking this onto the last chapter, but...anyway. Pronunciation lesson time!
> 
> "Yun" is more properly rendered as "Yún" (pronounced "YU-in," as you can hear on [this page](https://translate.google.com/#en/zh-CN/Cloud)). 
> 
> Kyoshi is pronouncing her name properly, with two syllables ("KYO-shi") while Yun isn't ("KY-o-shi"), but Kyoshi doesn't bother to correct her. None of this is of any particular importance and you can imagine their names pronounced however you like, but that's how I hear them.


	6. The Leaf and the Rock

“This is no story for children, Korra.”

The three fascinated little airbenders gathered around her don’t seem to be going anywhere despite my warning. Korra lets the youngest one climb onto her shoulders before answering me. “Come on Kyoshi, I got them up to speed and they won’t interrupt. I was really clear about that, believe me.”

“Seeing as how two grown men couldn’t resist, I’m not inclined to trust that, but…some of the things we did should have no place in a child’s mind. I was hardly a hero,” I say. “And to be perfectly blunt, there are some less than innocent parts of this tale.”

“But there are only five airbenders left in the world, including me. I thought they’d like to hear about their culture from someone who was actually there to experience it.”

It would be an awful burden, to be the scions of an entire civilization. “Oh, very well.”

“Great! I’ll bring Tenzin next time, too.”

⁂

“You’ve got to be the leaf!”

I gave Yun a sidelong glance before turning back to the spinning gates. She meant well with her encouragement, certainly, but I’d heard the same thing about a thousand times over the past two months. More specificity would’ve helped. The bruises on my shoulders and arms ached under my kimono while Yun got the gates going again.

“I’m not built for being a leaf,” I said, waving a hand over my body. I was taller than the gates themselves, for goodness’ sake. One more try, I decided. One more attempt before I stopped for the day and went back to regular airbending practice. There hadn’t been much success on that front, either, but it left me with much less bruising. “Show me again? Please?”

Yun smiled and went over to the starting position, giving the gates an extra rush of air to keep them spinning. She was always smiling for one reason or another, it was…infectious. Her robes billowed behind her as she ran the gates, weaving and pivoting harmlessly around them. Whenever it looked like one was about to strike her, she was already gone, turning on her heel into the empty space left by an adjacent gate. After only a few seconds she was walking out the other side, bouncing from foot to foot as she always did when she was excited. “You make it look so easy.”

It was a mystery to me why she didn’t yet have her tattoos, given her obvious skill. Many of the other seventeen year-olds did, and the abbot had enough faith in her abilities to leave my training almost entirely in her hands. Maybe because she was the only nun there, perhaps? The tattooing process must have involved a good deal of nudity, and the monks might have been unwilling to tattoo a woman. Yun had said she was from the Eastern Air Temple, the Azuma temple as it was properly called, but never explained why she wasn’t still there beyond _liaising_. Bringing it up before had been the only thing to make her frown so far, so I had never pushed for an answer. I really, really didn’t want to upset the sweet girl who had been nothing but kind to me.

A pat on my arm made me start. Yun was very free with her touches, light and gentle, which was starting to desensitize me. When it came to her, at least. I was still panicking every time she did it for the first few days. “Can I make a suggestion?”

“Of course.” Anything that could get me through the exercise with less bodily harm.

“Your kimono is much thicker than our robes,” she said, color rising in her cheeks while she pinched a bit of my sleeve between her thumb and first finger. I had several changes of Air Nomad robes back in my room, as a matter of fact—each of them uncomfortably small. “The fabric is probably making it harder for you to free up and feel the currents of the wind. Not to mention that air isn’t your native element. This exercise can be difficult, even for us.”

Her point about freeing up made sense, but putting on too-small clothes seemed counterintuitive. I did want to get through the gates at least once, though, so I needed to make some kind of change. After making sure we were the only ones on the balcony I’d been bequeathed for training, I shrugged my upper body out of my kimono while keeping it cinched tightly around my waist. All that was left were my chest wraps and the fresh bruises from the morning, rolling along with the ridges of muscle on my arms and stomach. Yun tugged at her own sleeves and refused to meet my gaze when I looked back at her.

The gates were still going when I stepped up to the starting position. I took a deep breath, loosened up my arms, and wove my way inside. My first few steps were surefooted while I imitated Yun’s motions, turning away from one gate and slipping into the space left by another. Taking off my kimono really did make a difference, and the cool puffs of air on my bare skin served as a warning when I was about to be hit. I was in the middle, farther than I’d ever been, and all the motion was proving to have a certain mesmerizing beauty to it. There must have been some kind of mechanism in the base of the platform that kept the gates spinning in a navigable pattern— _WHAM_

I was overthinking. One gate caught me in the arm, throwing me off-balance and into another. One, two, three, four hits—the exercise wasn’t very forgiving of mistakes. Eventually the contraption tossed out on my rear with a few new bruises. Whoever designed the infernal thing must have enjoyed seeing people suffer.

“Kyoshi!”

Her exclamation was marked by worry, but otherwise I loved the sound of that name on her voice. My name, I reminded myself.  _Ky-o-shi_. It sounded so nice when she said it, even if she twisted it into three syllables rather than the proper two. She rushed over to where I’d gone down, hesitating for an instant to touch my bare, scarred skin before grabbing my shoulders. I squirmed under her touch, but I didn’t have the wherewithal to pull away. If I was going to be all right with anyone touching me, it was going to be Yun. She was so protective, so sweet. It was comical, really. To look at us, I should have been the protective one.

“I’m fine, Yun. Nothing wounded but my pride.”

“Let’s take a break,” she said, standing up and offering me a hand. “I’ll get in trouble if I keep bruising up the Avatar.”

“There are lots of people who should be in trouble for that, then,” I muttered.

Yun’s gaze slipped down to the scars covering my torso, and a deep frown tugged at her lips. “I can see that. How did you…how’d you get those?”

I took her hand and got to my feet. She followed me over to the balcony railing, where our lunches were waiting. Rice, tofu, vegetables, and…more vegetables. I missed meat so much. They said they would get me anything I wanted, except for that. At least they got me a good supply of face paint, though I’d left it off for training. “Which one do you want to know about?” I asked, picking at some beansprouts.

“That one,” she said, pointing to the freshest line, the one on my side.

“Fighting.” I traced the scar with my finger, running over the tiny ridge it had formed. “Li threw a disk a little too close.”

“A friend of yours?”

I shook my head. “Not even close. Any others?”

Yun pointed to an older, rougher line, going from my other side and down between my legs. “This long one here?”

“My father. I don’t want to talk about that one.”

The neutral expression I was putting on couldn’t have been very convincing, but Yun didn’t press the issue. I was glad. We ate quietly for a few minutes before I pulled my kimono back on. It felt so heavy, suddenly. Strange, the fabric wasn’t even that thick. I had to see if someone could sew larger robes.

“It’s really beautiful here,” I said, grasping for a different subject. That much I could talk about. We both turned around to look out over the little vista we had, where bison were cutting graceful lines through a cloudless sky and children were practicing forms in one of the courtyards below. Yun nodded and watched with that small smile she always had. “Is it like this at the eastern temple, too?”

“More or less. It’s not as old, so the column and arch designs are a little different. There are more bison, and…well, it’s all women, obviously.”

A tightly packed ball of air, along with a shouted apology, went whizzing by my head. “We didn’t have anything like this in Seizhon.”

“I’ve never heard of that town,” Yun said. I shrugged.

“You and everyone else. It’s the kind of place they forget to put on the maps.”

“Well, not anymore. If you came from there, it’s going to be on every map and everyone in Chikyu will know about it. Avatars tend to be pretty famous. Plus you get a statue here.”

Right…the statue room. My airbending still left something to be desired, so I hadn’t been able to get in there yet. There was still plenty of time, it had only been two months or so. I finished off the beansprouts in my lunch. “Famous. Great.”

⁂

Regular airbending was progressing even more slowly than the damned spinning gates. I imitated the movements, visualized the chi flowing through my sound chakra, let my kimono down again. I was even fairly certain that what I’d done to repel the rain on the  _Bianli_  had been airbending, but it just wasn’t happening. That was a stressful situation, though. Maybe the Southern Air Temple was too idyllic to get such a reaction out of me. Regardless,  _something_  had to change, because the most I’d succeeded in doing so far with the sweeping, circular movements was to make a nearby puddle ripple.

“You’re forcing it,” Yun chastised gently. There was no annoyance in her voice, but I wanted so badly to get the hang of it, for her if not for myself. I didn’t want her thinking she was a bad teacher. “You can’t treat air like you would earth. There’s no way to grab air, it’ll slip right through your fingers.”

I ran my hand through my hair and sighed. What she was saying made sense, but I found myself struggling all the same. The whole concept of air currents and wind flows made my head hurt. I wished I could have seen it, I would’ve had an easier time if I could actually look at what I was supposed to be bending. “I’m trying, all right? It’s hard. Yangchen probably had the same problems with earthbending.” The thought made me chuckle. To hear the stories, nothing could give her much trouble at all. “I’m not a leaf. I’m a rock.”

“Oh, you don’t mean that, you’ll make a beautiful leaf. You’ve done this so many times over the centuries. As far as Yangchen, maybe you can ask her? That’s what all your past lives are there for, after all.”

If I had been any better at meditation than airbending, that might have been an option. But I wasn’t, so the possibility remained out of reach. Sometimes before bed I’d make an earnest effort, though by then I’d been up since dawn on a vegetarian diet, and I was always too tired for the concentration it required. “I’ll stick with you for now.”

“Good! Let’s start again. First position.” One arm stayed folded in, elbow by my hip, and the other extended until the palm of my hand was level with my chest. “Deep breaths first. In…and out. In…out. Extend your dominant hand, draw it from right to left. Now bring your other hand in, moving in counter…big, slow circles. That’s it, keep up those movements. When your right hand comes all the way toward you, breathe in. When it’s as far as can be, breathe out. How’s that feel?”

“Slow,” I said. At least walking the Bagua circle involved moving my legs. I was liable to fall asleep doing the simple forms. “Isn’t there supposed to be more motion with these spirals?”

“You have to walk before you can run. And in your case I’m still trying to get you to crawl. All right, I think I see the problem. The movements here are too jerky and straight. You need to make a circle, but you’re making a…a rectangle, I think? It’s too angular.”

“This is what I’m used to.”

“How about I get some scrolls from the library?” she asked. “Maybe understanding the underlying ideas better might help?”

“No.”

“But this doesn’t seem to be working, and if you get a better grasp on the concepts—”

“I don’t know how to read,” I admitted, slumping my shoulders.

Yun’s brow knitted up. “What?”

“I can’t read!”

Yun hung back while I stalked over to the balcony railing, hunching over to avoid meeting her gaze. “No one ever taught me. I didn’t grow up in a temple. I’m a dumb, illiterate peasant who can’t read or write.”

“Kyoshi,” she said, coming up beside me and putting one hand over mine. A breeze, maybe from all the bison flying around, wound its way through my hair and rolled down my bare back. “You’re the Avatar. There’s  _nothing_  you can’t do. I’ll teach you, we’ll split the days. Airbending in the morning, reading and writing in the afternoon.”

There was such an earnestness in her voice that I believed her for a moment. I knew the list of things I couldn’t do was probably as tall as me, but there was such a maddeningly convincing way about her, every last word was so authentic. “You’re so sweet, Yun.”  _Don’t ever change._

She looked down at the shadows stretching across the next courtyard. “It might be a little late to start that today, though. And you still need some loosening up…yes! I know what we can do. Come with me.”

⁂

I didn’t know why I agreed to something so silly.

The air itself was actually wet in the sauna. I didn’t know that air could even  _be_  wet. It was like sitting in a boiling teapot. The only sound was the hiss of steam coming up off the hot rocks in the corner. The sharp smell of eucalyptus leaves permeated everything, and I was sure my sweat would smell like the stuff for a week. At least my clothes wouldn’t. All I had was a towel folded over my lap, but that was enough since I was alone. I couldn’t figure out for the life of me why a temple for men had sex-segregated saunas. They weren’t new, so I knew it wasn’t built that way for Yun. Maybe things used to be different in their society. The whole culture was still something of a mystery as far as I was concerned.

I shifted a little, and the wooden slats making up the bench beneath me pinched the bottom of my thigh. Just like the spinning gates, it was an exercise that demanded precision. Precision of stillness rather than precision of motion. Air Nomads loved their dualism. Not to mention the odd delight they seemed to take in making up painful lessons.

A knock on the door broke my concentration, such that it was. “Did you sweat out all that tension yet?”

Without waiting for a reply, Yun strolled inside, her own towel slung carelessly over her shoulder. I shirked away and got another pinch to go along with the pang of petty jealousy that stabbed through my belly when I noticed that everything was so…proportional on her body.

I thought it was jealousy, anyway.

Those robes really didn’t do her justice, but that was the point, I supposed. She was all smooth, light curves where I was solid, angular muscle. The weightless wispiness of air and the stolid strength of earth. The leaf and the rock, how disgustingly appropriate. Regardless, the steam was helping a fair bit, relaxing the knots in my shoulders and opening up the pores of my skin. Even the blotches that followed my jawline, one of the few drawbacks of my face paint, felt like they were shrinking.

“Still working on it,” I said with a shrug.

“You know you’re supposed to put the towel under yourself, right? Isn’t sitting on the bare wood uncomfortable?”

I hunched over a little more and rubbed the back of my neck. “I’m fine.”

She shrugged, laid her towel across the bench opposite mine, and ladled more water onto the hot rocks before sitting down. More steam plumed up, obscuring her shape somewhat, although the lines of her body were still visible. The very soft, gentle lines—

I gave the bridge of my nose a good pinch while she leaned forward. “Kyoshi, I thought of something else that might help you.”

A cold bath would probably have helped me more than anything right then. “What is it?”

“Well, I know I said I was trying to get you crawling, but that might be too ambitious right now. Even before that, I need to get you sitting up,” she said, taking deep, cleansing breaths to let the sauna do its work.

The image of me thrashing around on the floor like a helpless infant, unable to sit up by itself, was probably more amusing to her than it was to me. “How do we do that?”

Yun gave me a conspiratorial glance. “Fans.”

“Fans?”

She nodded. “Fans.”

“I need a little more here,” I said, pursing my lips.

“There are these fans that some of the monks here use to teach the children how to reshape air currents and feel the effects of the wind better,” she explained. “Light little paper fans. There are metal ones too, but we don’t need those right now. And I thought it might help, because we need to go back to the absolutely fundamental lessons.”

Her tone was matter-of-fact, but the words still cut deeply. I wanted to do better. I needed to. It was my birthright, my duty. But waterbending and even firebending came so much easier. I was never an earthbending prodigy like my older brothers, but I got it eventually. Airbending, though…I didn’t want to be treated like a child. It made me feel so helpless, when I should have been the one doing the most to help the world.

“I’m sorry I’m such a difficult student,” I mumbled.

“What? No, no,” Yun said quickly, going over to my bench and sitting beside me. “Ow—really, how do you sit on this without a towel…Kyoshi, you’re an earthbender trying to learn airbending. I can’t imagine what kind of disadvantage that is, and I haven’t been accounting for it. I’ve been treating you like a regular Air Nomad girl who doesn’t know any other way to bend. You’re not a difficult student, I’ve been a bad teacher.”

I didn’t hate many things. My parents, my brothers, the taste of fried clams…seeing Yun so crestfallen went to the top of that list. The feeling of my heart twisting up at the sight of her shuddering was too painful. Maybe I  _was_  the protective one after all. I hadn’t intentionally touched another human being in almost three years, and even then I was always wearing clothes, but I still saw my arms reaching out, still felt my hands clasping her shoulder, still heard her short gasp as I hugged her. Hmm. I liked hugging her. Granted, I didn’t think we’d be sweaty and naked when I finally did, but it was still nice.

“Kyoshi…”

“We both have some learning to do,” I said, tentatively resting my head on top of hers. “You’re not a bad teacher. Look at all the nonsense you had me do today, all because you wanted to help me.”

“Hey!”

The feeling of her arms wrapping around my waist made me want to tremble, but I leaned into it all the same. “Bring the fans tomorrow. And then we’ll do the reading and writing, all right?”

She was so warm. “All right.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just kiss already, you thirsty little... _*grumbles*_
> 
> Yes, fans are essentially airbender training wheels.


	7. Earthly Tethers

“Isn’t this great? Nothing like a ten-mile hike first thing in the morning.”

Yun couldn’t see the glower I was sending her way, and though I wanted to point out that we started hiking well before what any reasonable person would consider ‘morning,’ I stayed silent for fear of extending our trek. There was a time when I would have considered myself a morning person, but Yun and the rest of the Air Nomads were on another level entirely. It was like they thought the sun wouldn’t rise if they weren’t awake to see it happen.

“Great…not the word I’d use.”

There was a bitter chill on the wind from being so high up and in the open air of the mountain range, and I was silently glad that I wore my kimono instead of the robes I’d been given. I could even feel small cracks in my face paint from the cold, when I wasn’t feeling the growls from my empty stomach. Yun seemed utterly nonplussed. “Can you tell me where we’re hiking to now? I can barely see the temple back there.”

“It’s a very spiritual spot,” Yun said, her voice full of playful mock seriousness. “Very sacred to the Air Nomads. If there’s anywhere you’ll be able to tap into your sound chakra and airbend, it’ll be there.”

“Then why didn’t we go there two months ago? And why isn’t the temple built closer to such a sacred place?”

“No one asked for my input when they were building the temple,” she countered. Yun could whip out a sharp wit when she wanted to. “And we didn’t come here sooner because it’s difficult to get to without a bison.”

“We could’ve taken a bison…?”

The rides weren’t always smooth, but they were certainly faster. Yun picked out a rock and sat down, looking over at me and pursing her lips. I pursed my lips right back and sat on the ground beside her. “Sometimes the journey is as important as the destination, Kyoshi. We’re almost there, let’s have our breakfast.”

She got no argument from me on that front. It wasn’t the meat I was still so used to, but hard-boiled eggs were at least familiar. And…more rice and vegetables, along with a few baozi for us to share. If I kept eating like that, I could kiss my muscles goodbye, which was a shame since I’d worked so hard for them. Still, I was getting used to the taste of Air Nomad food. When I’d first arrived, everything seemed bland and muted, even the tea, and Yun only cocked her head when I would ask for salt or sugar for something. With some time for my palate to adjust, I was starting to appreciate the subtle flavors she could point out that I’d never noticed previously. She was…changing a lot of my tastes, I supposed.

I still wanted a steak every so often.

“When we get there, I think you’ll understand how to airbend better.”

“I might have done it,” I said, my mouth still full of rice. “Once.”

“Really? When?”

“The day I got to the temple, a few hours before.” I grabbed one of the baozi from our food bag. Stuffed with spinach, like all the others. I bit into it anyway. “We hit a storm on the boat, the rain was coming down so thick…I don’t know if it was waterbending or airbending. Maybe a bit of both.”

“Hmm.”

Yun stayed quiet for several minutes, a rare event, even when I finished my food and started to pick at hers. She was looking right at it, so I had to imagine she didn’t mind. “What do you think it was?”

“I don’t know!” she said cheerfully.

“Oh. I’d hoped you might.”

“Nope! Never be afraid to say you don’t know something, it’s how you learn.”

My head bumped against the side of her leg. Sometimes I forgot how very different our worlds were. The temple, the town we went to occasionally for supplies, it was all such a far cry from everything I’d known all my life. Everything there was slow and quiet and contemplative, and all my memories of Seizhon, rough-hewn and unforgiving Seizhon, felt so ungainly in comparison. “If you say so.”

“I do say so. I’m no expert on Avatars or how they figure out their opposite element, even if I spend all my time with you and Yangchen was my great-great-aunt.”

That piqued my interest. “You never told me you were related to her.”

She brushed her fingers over her pendant. It certainly looked old enough to have belonged to Yangchen. “It’s not supposed to be important. We usually don’t even grow up with our blood parents or have a family history to trace. The only reason I know is because my mother is of rank at the Azuma temple and…makes it a point of pride that she’s related to an Avatar, I guess.”

Maybe that was why she wasn’t at her home temple? It was one of the few things she flatly refused to talk about, one of the things that would turn her cold, and I didn’t want to do that to her. Sweet, friendly Yun was much better. That was _my_ Yun. There were always going to be parts of our pasts that we weren’t going to talk about, I supposed. Instead I had to smirk at the thought of  _my_ family finding out who I was. I would’ve swam all the way back to Seizhon to see the looks on their miserable faces.

“Pride. Interesting quality for a nun.”

“No one’s perfect,” Yun said, a trace of defensiveness in her voice. She must’ve missed her mother. “And you’ve eaten the rest of my food, so we should get going. It’s not far.”

I bit back a yawn as we got up and started walking again. “You said that an hour ago.”

“So it’s even truer now!”

There was a certain frustrating soundness to her logic. At least I could clear some of the rocks from our path as we went. They slid off to the side, and I got an amused little laugh from Yun each time I rolled some stones in front of her. Even if I couldn’t airbend after our little expedition, hearing that made the hike worth it.

A pair of little paper fans hung from a loose loop at the back of her belt, jostling around when we started up a set of frighteningly ancient and worn-down set of stairs. They were so light that any passing breeze sent them bumping against her rear. Some heavier ones were available, but Yun had picked the lightest, most insubstantial pair, made of balsa and paper so thin it might have torn if I looked at it too hard. Better than her sticking me in classes with the six year-olds, I supposed.

“Whoa!”

It was only when I pulled back from my thoughts that I realized I had one foot over a ravine I couldn’t see the bottom of, having missed the nearby bridge by several feet. My stomach dropped out like I was hit in the gut with a boulder, and I started throwing my arms back to try and get my center of gravity back over solid ground. There was a moment where I could feel my heart tightening up until Yun threw one hand around my waist and sent a powerful blast of air with the other to push us both back.

The ground had seemed rather mossy and soft when we were walking, but it was surprisingly hard when we tumbled down onto it. I had to twist my body, quickly—Yun’s waifish enough that the fear I might break her in two was very real in my mind—and we landed beside one another, the morning dew leaving long dark splotches on our clothes.

“There ought to be a fence here,” I said, standing up and offering Yun my hand. She shot to her feet without my help and pounded ineffectually at my shoulders, shaking and shuddering. “Hey, hey!”

“Don’t do that!”

Her accent disappeared under the edge in her voice, and I took a step back. She never yelled. It would’ve been endearing and more than a little cute had she not been so obviously angry. “Yun—”

“You have to pay more attention! What if you had fallen, what if I didn’t catch you? What if you  _died_? I…the world needs you,” she mumbled, trailing off and staring hard at my feet. Her voice faded back to its usual volume. “You’re too important to fall off a cliff.”

I pulled her into a light hug, and she put her arms around my waist a moment later. I was getting better at that. When she finally stopped shaking I said, “I’m not going anywhere. Surviving is one of the few things I’m good at. But someone really should put up a fence.”

“They won’t do that, the elders don’t want to build up on this site. It detracts from the spiritual energy, they say. Even getting a bridge was a hassle, according to some old meeting records.”

Spirits seemed like they would be a little more resilient than that, but oh well. I actually got on the bridge that time and followed Yun across to a narrow little path winding alongside a river we’d crossed earlier. The air started getting warmer, which I attributed to the rising sun at first, but it was warming faster than it should have, given the early hour. Every gust of wind was lighter, too. Although I couldn’t say that I had ever been a particularly spiritual person, I could feel _something_ in the air. Maybe it wasn’t even a feeling, it seemed to run deeper than that. An energy? Whatever it was, something was sending tingles along my arms to my wrists and making the little hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

“Is the air getting…sweeter?” I asked.

“Here we are!”

The moss that covered the approaching path gave over to lush, rolling grass in a tiny oasis hidden on all sides by the mountain range. A spring that looked to be source of the river we’d been following flowed out of a gap in the cliff face nearby, and apart from that and a few trees where starlings were roosting, the only real feature was a single ancient standing stone in the middle of the clearing. Some dull, faded white paint showing the triskele heraldry of the Air Nomads, the same design as on Yun’s pendant and back at the temple, was its only feature. Wind from above funneled down, guided by the cliff walls on every side and creating a light, warm breeze.

“All right, this is pretty nice.”

“The old monks—the really old ones, before Avatar Taimo even built the temple—used this spot to honor Shina and Angshe, the great wind and sky spirits,” Yun said, taking a few apples from her bag and laying them at the base of the standing stone in offering. When she finished arranging them properly, she led me over to a clear stretch away from the trees and took the fans from her belt.

“But this place is a confluence of all the elements. We’ve got air, earth, and water, obviously, but a hot spring feeds into the river there, so there’s fire, too. And wind, which is what we need. Here, take a moment to get a feel for the fans.”

Both of them unfurled easily when I slid my thumbs near the hinges, putting the thin, yellowed paper on display. There were some characters there, written in faded black ink, but I couldn’t read them yet. We were only a week into my reading and writing lessons.

“Symbols for air and wind,” Yun explained, sensing my confusion. There was almost no weight to the fans, and I worried that I might snap them. They were tools for children, after all. “Now put your elbows at your sides, hands forward like you’re holding a tray. Keep the fans parallel and hold them a little loose.”

I did as she instructed while she made a slow circuit around me, nudging me into a wider stance and tapping on my back until I stood up straight, drawing up to my full height even if it made me a little sore. I didn’t fail to notice the way her hands lingered against me, either. A few months past I would have pulled away and given her a good whack on the head for getting so touchy, but…I trusted her. And the way her palms pressed into my kimono was almost familiar, comforting.

How things changed.

“What am I supposed to be feeling—?”

“Shh! Close your eyes and don’t think of anything else. Focus on the wind, its sound, the way it’s blowing through your hair and on your skin.”

Some of it blew into my face. A bird was tittering through its song nearby, and Yun was still walking around me, although she didn’t make any more corrections.  _Focus, focus_. It took a few minutes before I was able to shut out everything else and concentrate on the breeze blowing by. The fans tilted along with it in my weak grip, and I could visualize the unseen currents in the air around me. They were making the paper in the fans rustle. “Good, do you feel that? The air flowing around the obstruction?”

“I feel the wind, how do I start controlling it?”

Yun was shaking her head when I opened my eyes. “What?”

“Air isn’t earth. You can’t control it any more than you can control the snow or the tides.” Actually I  _could_  control those, but I stayed quiet. “That idea has to go, all right?”

She was getting frustrated, I could feel it. I bit the inside of my cheek and nodded. “We don’t control the air. We shape it, we influence it, we…well, we bend it. But we never force or order it. That would be like trying to hold water in a sieve. The fans are there so you can understand the way the air currents move and start to reshape them with a larger, flatter surface. Now slant the fans and bring your hands around one another like a waterbending form.”

It was the same motion I’d been practicing for weeks, and I could feel the stream nearby tugging as I moved through the form. Being able to bend everything was a messy mental process sometimes, and I needed to really concentrate on exactly what it was I wanted to bend. The fans provided the barest resistance to my movements, still rippling with the wind while Yun stood in front of me, watching in silence. I wished she would say something.  _Come on, don’t leave me floundering here, please…_

Her look was utterly blank until one of the fans twitched in my hand, blowing a gust of air into her robes and pushing the front right up over her head.

“Ah! Sorry!”

The fans fell softly to the ground, forgotten, while I went over and helped fix her clothes. Once she stopped squirming, I managed to find the edge and I got a better view of the lighter, snugger shirt underneath her outer layer. The robes  _really_  didn’t do her justice…focus, Kyoshi. I expected her to look annoyed or even bewildered once I smoothed out her robes and fixed her pendant, but instead she had a massive, beaming smile on her face. “You did it…”

Oh. Right. It was my airbending that hit her. A quick, jerky laugh escaped my throat as Yun threw herself into my arms. She was so fond of hugging, I could hardly bear to deny her. “I knew this would help,” she said, her voice muffled by my kimono.

“Looks like you were right.”

_Wow, you figured out airbending a lot faster than I did._

_I had a very good teacher._

Once I’d been lightly chastised for dropping my fans, we ran through the forms together. Everything she’d said started falling into place once I had something practical to attach it to. I couldn’t will the air into doing what I wanted, but there were so many currents swirling around us all the time that it became more a matter of reaching out and redirecting one.

“You know, I haven’t seen any of the children using these,” I said, moving in a small circle while I swirled up the air in front of me. It was strange, I couldn’t exactly see it as more than a few fleeting disturbances against the grass, but I could feel and hear it moving about. What a far cry from earthbending.

“They try not to use them much.”

“Why not?”

Yun spun up a small funnel in the palm of her hand. Honestly, she should’ve had her arrows, she was every bit as skilled as the monks who had them already. “The idea is to not need the extra little assistance. They help, but they’re also a crutch. A lot of techniques that need more hand motions aren’t possible with them. They’re supposed to be a tool to help build your confidence, not become another earthly tether.”

“Earthly what?” It certainly sounded like something important, but Yun never made me sit through any classes since I couldn’t read the scrolls for them.

“An attachment, a focus that isn’t your own spiritual enlightenment,” she said. “They’re not necessarily a bad thing, unless you get stuck on them. It could be pretty much anything…anyone,” Yun added quietly.

“Then I’m not going to use the fans again?”

“Oh, we’ll still use them, they help with understanding how this works. I didn’t carry them all the way out here so that we could forget about them right away. But I think it’s equally important that you learn to not rely on them.”

A little sorrow snuck into her voice, and I got the sense that we weren’t only talking about the fans. I ruffled her hair a bit, making her smile as she tried to pull away. “Let’s keep practicing.”

Eventually the sun crested over one of the cliffs surrounding us and descended behind another. We even skipped lunch, something I was truly loathe to do, because I didn’t want to break stride for some rice. Even though there wasn’t a proper Bagua circle there for us to use, we were able to imagine the shape easily enough, and we moved in counter to one another, keeping the air swirling in the space between us. I knew walking the circle was supposed to be a solemn, sacred routine, but I couldn’t help the occasional stupid grin or the little spates of laughter that kept cropping up. I was  _airbending_. Some dumb peasant girl from the Earth Kingdom was actually airbending. Firebending had frightened me and waterbending started being useful in a fight, but staying in the little hideaway, puzzling out my opposite element with my friend, my sweet, kind, best friend…who could blame me for smiling like an idiot?

“You’re doing so well, Kyoshi,” she said, slowing her pace to make the funnel between us die down. I flicked one of the fans to make some grass bend at my feet and then stopped opposite her. “Let’s try some meditating, all right? I want to see how helpful this place really is.”

My confidence was up in the sky by then, so I agreed without a second thought. After some stretching to cool down, we sat on opposite sides of the standing stone, facing away from it and each other. “Make sure you don’t touch the stone,” she said, deathly serious. “So now, close your eyes. Concentrate on the sound of my voice.”

No problem there. Yun started guiding me through the process, having me focus on my breathing, desensitizing me from the surrounding sensations. Her voice was soft and sweet as always, and I slowly felt my thoughts getting fuzzy. My back was starting to hurt, too. I slumped a little. Surely the spirits wouldn’t mind if I needed some support, would they? After all, I was the Avatar, I was half-spirit.

That was so much better, sitting against the stone. My back was very grateful to Shina and Angshe. Although with that I fell out of focus, and I could feel the hardness of the ground underneath me and the cold wind blowing on my face.  _Cold?_  Yun’s voice was gone, too. She was still guiding me, unless she’d fallen asleep. Given the hike to get up there, I wouldn’t have blamed her.

“Yun? Are you still there?”

I cracked one eye, and started to panic.

Wherever I was, it wasn’t the oasis I sat down in. The land around me was blighted and covered in ash, as if someone had burned everything to the ground. No grass, no river, no singing starlings…no surrounding mountain range, either. Only a gray sky and what looked like a battlefield after an army had moved on.

Heart pounding, I got to my feet and noticed that the standing stone was still there behind me. The paint on it was suddenly fresh and vibrant, though. And the design was much more elaborate than the ones I’d seen, with smaller swirls around the larger main triskele.

“Yun? Where are you?”

With as long as I’d been fighting, I knew what combat sounded like, and that was certainly what I heard. It was close by, too. I followed the noise, keeping the standing stone within view all the while. It definitely wasn’t the oasis. The ground under my feet was hard and flaky, not something that had ever had grass in it. My heart was beating out of my chest when I found the source of the commotion, a man in Water Tribe clothing flinging huge spikes of ice at a…a…

What  _was_  that?

I’d never seen anything like whatever it was the man was fighting. The only familiar feature was that it was standing on four massive legs. Its body wasn’t covered in hair or fur, but what looked like wispy, swirling shadow. Where its face should’ve been, there were too many tiny, bright yellow points to count, but even so they seemed menacing. It batted aside the ice with ease, shattering every spike into thousands of tiny pieces that landed around the field. And the man…I felt like I knew him. Given the way we were standing, he should have noticed me already, but he only kept on fighting.

Finally the monster took a huge swipe at him, cutting through his coat with unnaturally bright claws. The blue and white of his clothes ran a deep red, and I could almost feel the slash across my own chest. No—I  _could_  feel it, my kimono was in tatters, blood was pouring down my body—

“Kyoshi!  _Kyoshi!_ ”

I opened my eyes. Yun was shaking my shoulders wildly, the terror lined into her face giving over to relief when I looked back at her. She’d yanked me away from the standing stone, I noticed. There was a brief moment of lightheadedness and derealization, where everything felt like an especially vivid waking dream, before her arms squeezing around my torso brought me back to myself. There was a familiar soreness in my cheeks, too.

“It’s okay, Yun. I’m here.”

“You touched the stone, didn’t you?” she asked, her voice still shaky.

“Maybe a little.”

“Don’t scare me like that…”

“Why? What’d I do?”

Her face was still burrowed into the crook of my shoulder. “You didn’t do anything, that’s why I was scared. You were just sitting there for an hour. I thought maybe you finally got the hang of it, but you didn’t react when I tried to ask you something. And then you didn’t respond to  _anything_ , so I…panicked.”

“Is that why it feels like I was slapped?”

She pulled away and looked guiltily at her reddened palms. “Like I said. I panicked.”

And after all that talk of pacifism. I gingerly touched one of my cheeks. She could certainly leave a mark when she wanted to. “Sweet, silly girl.”  _My_  sweet, silly girl. My Yun.

“Did you fall asleep?”

I picked myself up and took a few more steps from the standing stone. “Maybe. If it was a dream, it was a bad one. Not like any nightmares I’ve had. Someone was fighting…something. It looked like it was made of shadows, and I felt like I knew the man fighting it.”

“You might’ve gone into the spirit world,” she said. “The veil between our world and theirs is thin here.”

“I don’t know.” I didn’t want to know, frankly. The spirit world, if that was what that was, seemed like a very unpleasant place. “Can we rest for a while? Away from that thing?” I asked, jerking my head toward the standing stone.

She nodded, and I picked out a spot under one of the larger, leafier trees nearby. The bark wasn’t quite as comfortable as smoothed-down stone, but I could live with that if it meant not getting thrown into a nightmare or the spirit world or whatever that was. I was so tired suddenly. Yun sat down in front of me and scooted herself back into my chest, drawing my hands down over her shoulders while I was still dazed. “I’m not a pillow, Yun.”

“Nonsense,” she said, resting her head against my collarbone. “You’re an excellent pillow, Kyoshi.”

I didn’t have the energy—or the desire—to argue. Once she got herself comfortable, I relaxed as best I could, resting my chin lightly on her head. She was so warm through her robes, and every so often I got a few frantic laughs from tickling her tummy. After an hour or two, I was able to move past my nightmare as the sky began to yellow with the sunset.

Yun stirred from her rest and glanced around before easing back into place. “Should we head back?”

I shook my head. So warm. “In a little while.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Kyoshi and Yun, art by [AATKAW](aatkaw.tumblr.com)) 


	8. Patola

I had only been back to Patola a few times in the six months I’d been at the temple, and for good reason. Flying was far from my favorite thing in the world, and even less so when I was the one steering. Yun was taking care of some of the younger children who’d fallen ill, so she’d lent me her bison to get medicine and run some errands along the way. I didn’t think Bima liked me very much, because it seemed like she was making every effort to twist and turn as much as possible.

“You think I’m going to clean you up if I get sick, furball?” I asked, maintaining my death grip on the reins. She leveled out after that, but gave me one last shake of her head for good measure. Try as I did to make myself comfortable, I wasn’t nearly as slight as Yun and didn’t fit as well into the crook of Bima’s neck.

Once we’d smoothed out, I shook my head clear. It wasn’t enough that we spent every day together, Yun was all over my mind, laughing and smiling. Sometimes I wanted to hug her and never let her go. Sometimes. All the time. The prospect of figuring out my feelings for her frightened me. She was a nun, the little voice in my head said. She was my teacher. Of course, there was an equally persistent voice telling me that she was my friend, that we were one another’s only friends, and it wasn’t wrong to care about her the way I did. When they started shouting over each other, that was my sign to go soak in a hot bath and try to work out my frustration with it all.

The only real relief I got is when I slept, when the nightmares came screaming into my mind. I still got all the usual ones, the kind that made me thrash around and wake up whimpering like a child, but ever since I’d touched that standing stone there were new ones, too. Most of them were similar, helplessly watching the same Water Tribe man fight losing battles against monsters made of shadows while I felt every injury he sustained in his recklessness. I didn’t wake up tossing and turning from those, but occasionally there would be new cracks in the wall from earthbending in my sleep, not to mention the lingering pain from the dreams.

If that was all they were, of course.

For better or worse, I had the disorientation of flying to focus on. I was an earthbender, I wasn’t meant to be up in the air and flying. Solid ground was where I belonged. Even if I’d started to get the hang of airbending, the bison ride was turning my stomach. My fans bounced in place on my belt as we started to descend. I’d gotten used to working without them, but they still helped, and the ones I had were a rather nice pair I didn’t want to leave in my room all the time. Their lacquered red handles shone when they caught the light, and I could finally read the little characters printed on their crisp white paper.

We touched down, finally. Bima skittered to a jerky stop outside the town, and I was all too happy to slide down her neck and back into the comforting embrace of the earth. A nudge at my hip reminded me that Bima expected a treat for not throwing me off in midair, and I got to my feet so I could feed her a few apples from my bag. She scarfed them down, cores and all, before settling in for a nap. “Make yourself comfortable, furball…”

She laid down and flexed her tail with a snort, giving me a rude rush of air that meant I had to smooth out my robes. I looked over the list of supplies I’d been given, written in very simple script. Three bolts of fabric, sewing needles, a sharpening stone, garlic, fresh radishes, blue ink, and some kind of root that worked as an emetic. Yuck. And I had to get some robes repaired, so it was off to the tailor first.

Patola was as quiet as always, and in regular robes, without my face paint, I blended easily into the light crowds in the streets as an especially tall Air Nomad with some mixed ancestry. It was an odd kind of thrill, walking around without being recognized as the Avatar, like I was carrying around a light, tingling secret deep in my chest. There were still a few looks because of my height, but other than those I got to the tailor without incident.

“How did you tear this, exactly?”

The long rip along the chest of one of my spare robes was the result of trying to combine airbending and earthbending and then having a rock fly up too fast, but I couldn’t explain that to the little old tailor behind the counter. As embarrassing as that had been, it gave the monk we had been working with a nosebleed, and that had brought on a small, perverse swell of pride. “I…forgot to stretch one day. Can you fix it?”

“Of course. It’ll be a few hours,” he said, setting the robes aside.

“I need some supplies, too.”

That was a good deal of my list taken care of, but I had been given much more time than necessary, I had no supervision, and I got a small stipend from the temple…

I made a beeline for the docks, where there were a few ships in port to trade and take on supplies. Finding a cook stretching his legs on solid ground didn’t prove to be much of a challenge, and eighteen copper pieces later I was strolling off with a packet of bakkwa from his kitchen, leaving him none the wiser about who bought it. It was a rough, salty dried meat, and the freshness was questionable, but it smelled so good…I ducked into an alley, plopped myself down next to some barrels, and tore into my purchase with all the grace of a rabid badgermole.

Delicious meat, how I’d missed—oh.  _“_ _Blech!_ _”_

It was fresh, but there was so much salt, and the taste was so thick and heavy that I spat out the first bite. Did it always taste that way? Or had my palate become oversensitized from all the bland rice? I tried another piece, to be sure that it wasn’t simply a reflexive shock to my system after six months without it. The smaller bite managed to stay down, but I still felt my lips puckering as I swallowed. I stuffed the rest into my bag with a scowl. “Damn it.”

Stupid monks. They’ve ruined meat for me. All I could be glad for was that there was no fighting pit nearby so they couldn’t ruin brawling for me, too. I got to my feet and spat a few more times to get the taste of beef out of my mouth when I saw some sailors on shore leave crowded around something about halfway down the alley. It must’ve been interesting, with the way they were jeering and pressing in. I ran a finger along the strap of my bag while I went to take a closer look.

Oh. Lovely.

It was a pair of girls they’d crowded around, some locals in the usual robes with expressions that made it very obvious they would rather be somewhere, anywhere else. Well. I  _was_  the Avatar, it looked like part of my job. Three of them, one of me…they should have brought more people, it wouldn’t even be close.

My fans bumped against my hip, tempting me to keep up the charade of simply being an airbender, but I didn’t have the precision to knock them down without hitting the girls they’d cornered. Earthbending, then. It’d been too long since I had the chance to stretch those muscles anyway, it’d be nice to keep my skills sharp and do some good at the same time.

I slammed my heel into the ground and ripped up a few stone cuffs. They hovered in the air for a moment, spinning into the proper orientation, and then flew forward. I’d never done the trick with two targets, let alone three, but I’d never tried it as the Avatar, either.

The cuffs hit home, clamping around their ankles and drawing their attention for the first time. All of them went up, and I made a point to knock their heads on the ground before getting them dangling by one leg. The girls bit back laughs when they started flailing before dashing off around the corner. I dug my heels into the dirt and floated them down the alley, back toward the docks. It was good to know that all those drills to get the proper circular motions for airbending hadn’t made me lose my sharper, angular touch.

I fastened two of them to the side of a building, but I took the third, the one who looked like their leader, and put him over the water, letting him hover there for a moment while I took my time walking over. His collar was loose when I reached down to grab it and pull him upright, letting the cuff unlatch and drop into the water. Six months ago I could’ve held him over the water without a problem, but I could feel my Air Nomad diet in the burn coursing through my arms at the effort of holding him off the ground. There was strength enough for a little taunting, though.

“Stop acting like a bunch of hog monkeys looking for a rut, or next time I’ll aim a lot higher than your ankle,” I said, my voice dry. The fabric of his collar started to tear in my grip. “Can you swim?”

He nodded, and I let him go, dropping him into the water with a satisfying  _splash_. The old Air Nomad scrolls were always talking about how important it was to let go. If that was what being the Avatar was about, it wasn’t terribly difficult work. Kind of fun, really. The other two looked much better as wall decoration than they did leering at girls, so I affixed cuffs for their other ankles and left them there. Once their friend got out of the water, he could help them. Rats lived in packs, after all.

Once I was out of their sight, I winced and rubbed the ache out of my arms. I was going to have to get used to meat again, or else I needed something with more protein. With a quick jog, I crossed the alley. It turned out the girls only rounded the corner to catch their breaths. Probably couldn’t get much farther with the way they were shaking. I really needed Yun for the comforting, it wasn’t my specialty. She was the silky little glove with the soft touch slipping on after I’d done the rough, heavy-handed things. That day I had to be both, I supposed.

“Are you two all right?” I asked, wiping away some water that had splashed onto my arms.

“Yes…thank you,” one of the girls said. She couldn’t have been more than fifteen or so.

The other one looked up at me, her head cocked to the side. “You’re an earthbender? Dressed like an airbender?”

I moved one hand in a slow spiral, spinning a little ball of air into existence before moving it around on my palm. They watched for a moment in confusion before the truth fell on them with fascinated looks. “I’m a little bit of both,” I said, lowering my voice to a playfully conspiratorial tone.

“Avatar Kyoshi?”

Strange, they pronounced it with two syllables like I did, rather than stretching it out to three like Yun did. Maybe it was a result of her accent. “Well, I’m not Yangchen. And I know you’re all airbenders, you shouldn’t be afraid to use it if you need to. I’m not always walking around down here.”

“We’re not supposed to use force,” the girl who first spoke said.

“Right, right.” They didn’t like using violence to solve their problems, they didn’t use it at all if they could help it, but I wasn’t an Air Nomad. I might’ve worn their robes and ate their food—their bland, bland food that made meat taste far too rich by comparison—but I was no pacifist. “Well. Go on home, they won’t be bothering you again.”

They both hugged me, and I crouched down after a moment to return the gesture. Why was everyone else so short? My stomach growled as I straightened up. “Are there any good places to eat nearby?” I asked, a little sheepishly.

Apparently there were, and they pointed me in the right direction before running off. The little stall I arrived at specialized in miso soup with a seaweed and mushroom broth rather than the fish stock I was used to, and with the right spices it wasn’t half bad. The sharp taste of the onions and the soft tofu in it were much easier on my tongue than the bakkwa was, savory and sweet and not loaded down with any ethical considerations. I ripped up one piece of the jerky and dropped the bits into the soup, taking up small pieces along with the tofu. After a few bites it got more tolerable. The woman running the stand blanched when she was what I was adding, but said nothing while I guiltily wolfed down the rest before heading back to the tailor.

My bag was soon laden down with sartorial supplies, and I drifted through the nearby open air market for the rest of the things I needed. The garlic and radishes were easy enough to find, and the apothecary got me the root I needed after warning me of its effects by describing them quite graphically. Good thing I’d already eaten. I had to haggle a bit with the man selling the blue ink, but I got the price down eventually.

I wasn’t expected back for another hour or so, and I took some time to stroll through the rest of the market, switching which shoulder I had my bag on every so often to keep from getting sore. Children were running around and playing, birds were singing, and there were actually women mixed in among the men. It was an entirely different energy than at the temple, less restrained, more natural. I liked it. I only wished the ride down wasn’t so unpleasant, otherwise I might have come to Patola more often. As nice as the temple was, the walls had a way of closing in after a while.

There was a stall that caught my eye, where a wizened old lady was selling swan feathers dyed in all sorts of colors for a few coppers apiece. I was picking out a saffron one for myself and a deep verdant one for Yun—a cultural exchange, I decided—when my hackles suddenly stood on end. Years of fighting had beaten it into me that I shouldn’t ignore those feelings, and I could feel the disturbance in the air as I ducked, a fist flying right over my head.

I sent an elbow back on reflex, crashing hard into something that wasn’t behind me a moment ago. The sailors had gotten down and found some friends, I saw. They’d even fished the other one out of the harbor. Sailors, why was it always sailors…there were six of them all told, including the one holding his nose while bright red blood streamed down his face. I’d gotten him pretty good with my elbow, it seemed.

Well, if they wanted a fight, that was fine by me. I’d been too long without a good one. I set my bag down beside the stall and rolled my neck while they looked like they were reconsidering their choice to pick a fight. It was a little too late for that.

The ground under their feet split apart, rattling the entire market while they struggled to keep their footing. Three of them fell down, counting the one I had already hit, but they would be up quickly enough. In fact, I was counting on it. One of the sailors still on his feet tried to rush me, but a knee in his gut and a good knock on the back of his head put him down, stopping just short of the stall with the feathers. His friend who was trying the same thing on my other side got himself into a headlock for his trouble, and I felt a little grin tugging at my lips. The motion, the sweat and blood mingling in the air, the panicked, frantic blur of bodies—it felt so exciting, so invigorating, so _good_ , after so many months of peace.

I’d gotten my blood pumping by then, so it was a simple matter to pull the man out of the headlock, pick him up by his collar and the buckle of his belt, and toss him into his friend, who was still standing. They started crawling away while the three who went down before got back to their feet. I was tempted to go for my fans, but I wanted to wait for the right moment to let them know who they tried to sucker punch.

The sun flashed in my eyes, and a punch came flying into my gut while I was blinking my vision clear. Low blow…the wind flew right out of my lungs, and everything I’d eaten was ready to go along with it. I couldn’t throw up and deal with the sailors at the same time, I wasn’t that good. I had to end of it, then. Still trying to get my breath back, I grabbed one fan and thrust it forward until they all struck the far wall. Bending two elements, not to mention all the uncustomary violence, has gotten some attention, and I didn’t take any chances that time. I bound all of them by their wrists, waists, and ankles before picking up my bag. The little old lady selling the feathers poked her head up from under her stall in time to see me put down the last of my money and take the two feathers I’d been looking at.

I decided to take my leave before any more fights found me, and Bima was exactly where I’d left her, lolling on her side at the edge of the town. She righted herself when I produced the last apple from my bag and begrudgingly allowed me to climb onto her neck while she chewed. I couldn’t crack the reins the way Yun did, so I patted the top of her head until she beat her tail and turned back toward the temple.

Being the Avatar didn’t seem so hard. Trouncing sailors and flying off might not have been everything I had to do, but fighting came easily, even the real fights instead of the ones where I was pulling my punches in an arena. It was something to think about later. I rubbed my hand slowly over my stomach. There was definitely going to be a bruise to explain there.

When I got back, Yun looked just as sick as the children she was taking care of, the poor thing. Her short hair was matted down with sweat, the collar of her robe was rumpled, and there was a trace of shine under her running nose. I must’ve had it bad, because I still thought she looked cute. Maybe not particularly huggable right that minute, but cute.

“How was town?” she asked. Her accent, combined with her stuffed nose, was downright hilarious. It was all I could do to bite back my laughter, and I only did so because she was so obviously in distress. “Did you find everything?”

“There was a lot less sneezing down there,” I said, shrugging off my bag to open it up. “Here’s the medicine. You should…probably get a bucket before you use it. And here. I got you this.”

I took the feathers from my pocket and handed her the green one while I held on to the yellow one. Yun smiled—or at least made the best effort she can, considering how puffed up her face must have felt—and tucked it into her inner robe, over her heart. I put mine in the same place. “Thank you…”

For all its strength, my body was bad at fighting off colds and flus, so I knew I would get sick if I let her hug me like she was about to. I didn’t much care.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More fluff! That can only mean one thing: _something bad is coming_
> 
> Also, I imagine that much like Korra, Kyoshi rolls up the sleeves of her Air Nomad robes. So...you can have fun with that mental image.


	9. The Abbess

I’d been at the temple for a little over ten months when Abbot Tsung died.

Everyone else stopped their breakfast when the bell rang out in three long chimes, and Yun nudged me with her elbow when she noticed I was still tearing my way through some baozi. “What, what is it?” I asked, my mouth still full of cabbage and onion.

“Shh!”

Someone came in and informed a few of the more senior monks, who quickly disseminated the news through the dining hall. It had been peaceful, apparently. He’d gone to sleep and simply never woke up. The only people I’d really known who had died were my grandparents, and I had seen the abbot even less than them. He came by sometimes, certainly, checking up on my progress and making sure Yun was teaching me everything I needed, but for the most part I had stayed to my parts of the temple and he had stayed to his.

And yet I couldn’t help feeling a little sad.

Yun was drumming her fingers on the table before she bumped into Liang, one of the older acolytes we sometimes recruited for sparring. Her expression wasn’t sad so much as it was nervous. I couldn’t imagine why, she didn’t seem any closer to the abbot than I had been. Whatever it was, I put my arm around her shoulder and let her lean on me until we shuffled out to the main courtyard with everyone else.

The vultures were circling overhead while one of the other elders unwrapped the white cord of office from around the abbot’s neck. He stood back to let some of the senior monks place his body in a simple palanquin. Like everyone else who passed at the temple, abbot or acolyte, novice or monk, he was carried off for sky burial on the next mountaintop, vultures slowly following. Death had a way of equalizing things.

Some of the other elders said a few words, but overall it was a very silent affair. The few funerals I’d been to were more raucous, but that might have been because of the presence of lots of baijiu. Even the bison stayed out of the air, as if sensing the heaviness hanging over the temple. All the quiet got disconcerting after a while. It wasn’t the regular kind of quiet with energy and vibrance bubbling under the surface, but the sorrowful, pressing kind of quiet. There were usually children laughing and playing or monks debating some finer points of cosmology on the terraces, but not then. Yun didn’t even bother to work out a training routine for me that day, and instead we holed up in a corner of the library and read some old scrolls while she looked wistfully out the window every few minutes.

“What’s the matter?” I asked. “He wasn’t your dad, was he?”

“No, nothing like that.” Yun idly traced a finger over her scroll, reading the same line for the sixth time. “I don’t know who my father is, actually…did anyone ever tell you how they pick new abbots and abbesses?”

I shook my head. It might have been in one of the scrolls she had me read for practice, but if it was I’d since forgotten it.

“Well, there’s going to be a vote, but they need another abbot or abbess to oversee it. That keeps it fair. There’s a pattern, so it should be the abbess from the western temple, the Nishi temple. And when they arrive—”

It’s what she didn’t say that was more important. When they arrive, they’ll want to know what she’s doing here, and they probably won’t drop the matter when she gets upset, like I did. Her mouth fell into a frown at the thought. “It’ll be okay,” I told her, reaching over to clasp her hand in mine.  _It’ll be okay because I’ll protect you._

_Wow, it sounds like you were a really good friend._

_A really good friend…are all the earthbenders in your time this dense, Korra?_

⁂

It was another three weeks before the snowy white bison arrived.

Yun had gotten back to her normal, upbeat self, and my airbending had improved enough that I was finally able to go without the fans more often than not. I still got knocked around by the spinning gates every five times out of ten, but I had decided the lesson from that exercise was metaphorical and I had already learned it. Patience or seeing opportunity, something along those lines. Sometimes things around the temple were so maddeningly ambiguous that I had to cut through it all and make up my own milestones.

I wasn’t the only one who’d improved over the months, either. Yun was so agile and light on her feet by then that I could barely hear her when she was out of my sight and didn’t want to be heard. The southern style she had adopted was to thank for that, seeing as how it was based more around evasion than weapons like the eastern form she grew up with. Thankfully she used her new power mostly for sneaky hugs from behind, but when she had a mind to, she could move so fast that scaling sheer walls presented no problem. We still had to design a circuit around the temple to see which of us was faster.

“Come down from there,” I said through a playful growl, bending some handholds into the wall to climb up to where Yun had perched herself, on top of a high arch. A gust of wind whipped at the loose parts of my kimono, replacing the still air that had dominated the day so far. “Hey!”

She was wearing that silly, mischievous grin of hers, and rolled out of the way when I answered her taunt with my own blast of air. Even though I had my red fans hanging off my belt, I was trying to use them less and less. It was still a challenge to get out of the mindset of earthbending, not to mention the starkly different motions airbending required. I couldn’t tense my hands or make fists, I couldn’t root myself to the ground…I was lucky the style Yun taught me drew from waterbending. I was no master, I wasn’t nearly as good as Yun or even some of the older acolytes, but I’d tested through nineteen of the thirty-six airbending tiers, and that was a lot more than any other earthbender could say.

“Lemur got your tongue?” Yun asked, summoning a small vortex to cushion her fall as she jumped down. Before I could swing my body around on the wall, she was already coming after me, scaling her way up without even using the handholds. She might have been part spider monkey, honestly…and then she was above me, hanging by two fingers in a tiny crevice. She reached down and lightly tapped me on the head, getting a groan from me in response. “I win again.”

“You’re not playing against a fully realized Avatar,” I said, lips pursed. “Enjoy your hollow victory.”

“Now don’t be a sore loser—ah!”

Yun wasn’t so smug when I reached up under her robes to tickle her side. She shook and shuddered, laughing so hard that her grip failed. Oops. Despite how light she looked, she had some weight to her, and having her land against me cost me  _my_  grip. I knew the monks got annoyed when I started moving pieces of the temple around, but I didn’t think they’d mind me pulling a platform up to break our fall. Yun threw her arms around my neck, and I had to sweep her up to avoid getting yanked down, so when we did finally land I had her cradled against my chest.

She looked up at me, cheek squished up to the side of my arm and making no move to get back to her own feet. The way the sun brightened up the blue in her eyes, that girl…and then she burst out laughing again. I joined in soon enough, but I kept holding her. She was soft and warm, what reason was there not to? We were friends, we were having fun, that was normal, it was…fine.

It was what I told myself to stay sane, anyway.

_You never told us she was interested in women._

_The things you can learn when you sit quietly and don’t interrupt, firebender._

“Are you going to carry me around?” Yun asked, wriggling herself to get into a more comfortable position against my chest. “Because I could get used to that.”

“You’re the one who had me read all those scrolls about princesses and their gallant warriors, isn’t this what they do?”

I tapped my heel on the floor to smooth it out before going across the balcony to look out over the other terraces. Things had gotten back to normal, more or less, though we still didn’t have an abbot. The remaining elders weren’t managing things until one of them got elevated, and instead Haan, the most senior monk who would probably become the next elder, was acting as the steward for the temple and the surrounding settlements in the meantime. He was a nice enough man, with bright pink cheeks and arms like tree trunks, but the job seemed to be aging him terribly.

“Does that make me a princess, then?” Yun asked, breaking me out of my contemplation.

Well,  _I_  certainly wasn’t the princess between the two of us. “Don’t get carried away…do you see that up there?”

All of the bison at the temple had cream-colored fur and darker brown parts that formed their arrow patterns, but the one coming down for its final approach—from the east, I noticed—had bone-white fur and much darker arrows, almost black.

I didn’t actually feel Yun go cold, but I might as well have with the way she shrank in my arms. Her legs swung over my hand so she could get back to her feet, and the fabric near her belt was going to fray with how she was nervously running her fingers over it. “That bison…that’s Hantei,” she said with an unsteady voice. “He belongs to the Azuma abbess.”

“Why are people coming from the eastern temple?” I asked. That was definitely the wrong side of the world. “Yun?”

She didn’t respond, and instead slipped from my side to run off toward the stables and the landing area. Everyone else I could see from my balcony was going in the same direction, and as I followed along I felt the ground shake with the bison’s landing. There were all kinds of expectant murmurs and anticipatory glances toward the stables. Nothing exciting ever really happened there, so I knew why everyone had gotten into a tizzy. I wished I knew why Yun was trembling on the periphery of the assembled crowd, though. Not that I needed to know that to comfort her. I stepped up beside her to put a hand on her shoulder, but she edged behind me, maybe for some sense of safety.

The bison, Hantei, looked so odd up close, or at least the part of his head I could see looked odd. His black-and-white fur was such a stark contrast compared to the cream and brown of the other bison, as if he’d flown right out of an etching. I expected him to sniff at the monks or go off to find the other bison, but he stayed perfectly still. Strong training, I supposed.

Some of the monks in front of us were parting to let people through. Haan was there in his red steward’s robes, as were the remaining elders, who were flanking three women wearing robes of a slightly different cut. It was the same kind as some of Yuns’ robes, I noted, a bit looser in the bust and snugger around the waist. None of them came up past my collarbones. Each of them had a set of pale blue arrows visible on their hands and foreheads, and the one in the middle was wearing a blue cord draped loosely around her neck that ended in a long, swaying tassel.

“Abbess Tian, this is Avatar Kyoshi,” Haan said, pointing me out, as if the one person in the dark green kimono and face paint could have been anyone else. He sounded so tired.

She and the two other nuns accompanying her bowed deeply, and I returned a slightly shallower bow. Yun’s grip on my belt tightened while the abbess righted herself and smiled. “Your Holiness,” she said. Her accent was familiar. “It’s a great honor—Yun?”

Her smile fell away, and her whole posture tensed up, growing noticeably more guarded. The two nuns flanking her exchanged a glance while Yun took a shaky step out from behind me, running her hand through her cropped hair. She wouldn’t meet the abbess’s suddenly sharp gaze, and looked at the tassel on her blue cord instead. Not exactly how I would expect a liaison to act.

“Mother…”

What.

Tian and her retainers slipped by us both with Haan and the elders in tow. Some of the remaining monks were whispering among themselves, but before I could ask Yun anything, she was gone. All I saw is a little flash of saffron rounding the corner of a side hall nearby. Not that I would have ever told her, but I felt a bit lost without her there telling me what to do, so I followed the path I thought she took.

For all my time at the temple, the corridors and courtyards were still confusingly similar, built with the same angles and designs throughout. She wasn’t on our balcony, though from there I saw the visiting entourage on the main terrace below. Our dormitory, maybe? The baths outside the sauna?

I decided to try her room, it was the closest place I could think to look. Although with the way she could move around, she might have been on a roof somewhere that I simply couldn’t access. The women’s dormitories were easy enough to get to, but on my way I passed the entrance to the statue room and noticed it was ever so slightly ajar. I couldn’t imagine anyone left it open by mistake, or why anyone would even be in there, except perhaps to hide. The door was incredibly heavy, carved out of solid oak, and I was out of breath by the time I’d moved it enough to enter. Inside, the only light was a thin bar from the opened door and some windows high above me.

The room made me feel strange, like I was supposed to know all the people inside. All I got when I went in there was a prickling sense of familiarity and a sneezing fit from all the dust. No revelations, no bursts of Avatar wisdom. That day, though, I heard a little whimper from farther inside. I went by Kuruk’s statue to find Yun sitting at the base of Yangchen’s, huddled with her knees up to her chest, nervously running her fingers over the sides of the little swan feather I had bought for her months prior. She stiffened when she saw my feet, but didn’t look up. It wasn’t the most comfortable room to sit in, but I put myself down beside her and waited until she was feeling well enough to speak.

“I’m fine,” she said.

“You’re a bad liar, that’s what you are.”

That got a short, unsteady laugh from her. “Why didn’t you tell me your mother was the abbess?”  _Why didn’t you tell me she was the one who sent you here,_  I wanted to ask.

“Didn’t think it was important,” Yun mumbled. Her voice was so flat and far away, and the dejection… “I didn’t think you were going to meet her, I didn’t think she was going to show up instead of the nuns from the Nishi temple.”

I shifted closer so we were hip to hip. That seemed to start unclenching her by small degrees. It was amazing what a simple touch could do, sometimes. “Yun…do you want to talk about it?”

Rather than reply, she buried her face in the folds of her robes between her hunched-up knees. That was a no. “All right. Come here.” I could hug her, at least. She leaned into my side while I put both arms around her, still turning the feather over in her hands.

There had been a hope, unspoken but still hanging between us, that I would do what I could to shield her from any prying questions from the western temple’s delegation, but all the shielding in the world wouldn’t do any good against people who already knew even more than me. I wished she would tell me what it was that got her sent south, but then, there were parts of my life I was in no rush to share, either.

We stayed there for a while, I wasn’t sure how long. There was no good view of the sky, so the only way to tell was by the soreness in my rear that turned slowly to numbness. I didn’t care, I would stay there with her as long as she wanted. Her shaking stopped after a time, but she never loosened the grip she had on my kimono. Poor thing. Eventually I got a few words from her. “I’m going to take Bima out for a little while.”

I stood up, trying to surreptitiously work out the kinks in my back from sitting for so long, and hoisted her up so she could go to the stables. Nope—wasn’t done hugging yet, apparently. I finally seemed to be finished growing, but our height difference meant that her face went right into my chest. There…wasn’t a lot there, much to my chagrin, but she nuzzled in all the same. I gave her a good squeeze and lifted her slightly off her feet, and that never failed to get a laugh.

“Go on,” I said, setting her back down. “Bima could use the exercise.”

Her gaze slipped back to me one more time before she disappeared behind the door and went off to the stables. My smile faded. I had the opportunity to get some answers, I wasn’t going to waste it. I turned back to the statue of Yangchen first, though. Yun was definitely wearing the same pendant, it had the same notches on some of the beads. “Any advice? She’s your great-great niece.”

The stone was utterly silent.

Once I’d pulled the huge door shut—no easy task for three people, let alone one—I headed down the hall before realizing I had no idea where to go. Finding people in the temple could be a nightmare. Tian’s group would probably have set their things down somewhere, but where would they go after that? The meditation room the elders used? Haan’s office?

I settled on starting with the dining hall…I was hungry. Most of the monks I passed were buzzing about the new arrivals, but I didn’t overhear anything about where I might’ve found them. Well, the temple was only so big. There were three courtyards to cut across to get where I was going, and an air of normalcy had resettled over the classes and meditation groups taking advantage of the pleasant day. Some of the younger students had warmed up to me, and I certainly didn’t mind that, I liked children. They waved or called out as I went by, and I gave them a little smile before continuing on.

The smells of sauces and spices pierced the air when I stepped into the dining hall, and there they were. I was having good luck with finding people that day. Tian was between her retainers at the table where Yun and I usually sat. We’d never actually been herded there, Yun had staked out that space for herself before I’d arrived. Maybe a fondness for corner tables ran in their family. I fixed a small plate at the buffet, taking a liberal application of soy sauce with my tofu, and pretended to look around for a seat in the half-empty hall until I caught the abbess’s eye.

“Your Holiness,” Tian said, her voice slow and measured again. I didn’t like that title. “Please, sit with us.”

Easy enough. I took a seat across from them, opposite Tian. With less commotion, I could pick out the similarities between her and Yun. Thin lips, prominent cheekbones, the same little upturn of their noses at the bottom…Yun’s skin was ever so slightly darker, but there was something familiar about Tian that I couldn’t place for the life of me. “This is Sister Jie and Sister Shiei,” she said, without actually indicating which nun was which. I gave them both a small nod.

“It’s a pleasure,” I lied, and started bathing a chunk of tofu in soy sauce. “But please, just call me Kyoshi. I hope you’ll enjoy your stay, even considering the circumstances.”

“And how have you found the Jongmu temple?” Tian asked. “It’s been almost a year, as I understand. That’s how long the Earth Sages have been sending summons for you, at least. Have you tested through any of the airbending tiers?”

“Nineteen so far. Yun is a good teacher.”

It slipped out before I remembered who I was speaking to. Tian’s grip on her chopsticks tightened, and Jie and Shiei looked pointedly away. I’d gone and touched a nerve, it seemed. Teasing out the information might be more complicated than I thought.

“Yes, my daughter is a very talented bender,” she said, straining to keep her voice level. “I suppose it makes sense that she would gravitate to another…well. Tsung gave his approval to keep you two separate like that, I’m sure.”

“He did. And speaking of the abbot, it was my understanding that it would be people from the western temple coming to oversee the transition.”

It seemed like almost any other topic helped to even her out. “Ordinarily, yes, but there’s an awful flu there, and the snows made it too difficult to send a message to the Uttara temple in the north. And…I did very much want to meet you,” she admitted. “I was Avatar Kuruk’s attendant whenever he visited the Azuma temple, and Avatar Yangchen was my great-aunt.”

“So I’ve been told.” Were we novelties for her to collect? Either way, I doubted I would get much information about Yun from her. Whatever gulf there was between them, it was still too raw. The other nuns were sticking beside her, so I doubted I could corner one of them somewhere else. Clearly it was going to require more thought. “Please excuse me, I forgot I was supposed to repair an arch that’s ready to crumble. Have a good day, sisters.”

They didn’t protest my hasty exit, and I took my food up to my training balcony. I fixed the handholds I’d made in the wall earlier and sat on the base of the spinning gate mechanism to finish my meal. There was a single bison soaring overhead, making all kinds of wild cuts and turns through the air, probably faster than was strictly safe. “Yun…”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, _I_ know who Yun's father is.
> 
> Also, I made a little goof back in Chapter 5. Yun is seventeen when we first meet her, not sixteen. It's since been fixed. This chapter is 10/11 months after Chapter 5, so Kyoshi is now nineteen and Yun is eighteen.


	10. Anniversary

“Yang…chun? Chin? Oh, Yangchen.” I tapped the character on the scroll a few times, committing it to memory. All the little lines started to run together after a while. “And I know this one means ‘Avatar,’ so…Avatar Yangchen lived for eighty-one years before dying in a blizzard near the Western Air Temple.” A bit anticlimactic.

My candle flickered as it burned down on the table, casting a warm, irregular light all over the little corner of the library I’d claimed for myself. Yun had left me to my own devices for the day, the first time in the whole year I’d been at the temple that she ran off without a word of explanation. I was sure it had been important, whatever it was, but it rattled me.

It was still rattling me. Having nothing to do was its own sort of work. Part of me wanted to have breakfast and then stay in bed for the rest of the day, but I liked to believe that I had a little more discipline than that. Instead I meditated, had Liang throw disks of air at me for evasion practice, ran through a few forms of eastern style airbending with Jie—or maybe it was Shiei—and one of the training sabers they brought, and then holed myself up in the library, where I had a half dozen or so scrolls laid out. There wasn’t much on Kuruk, mostly because he never did anything important as far as I knew, but there was plenty about Yangchen and the other Air Nomad Avatars before her. I was starting to get the sense that some of it was exaggerated, though. “There was an eclipse  _and_  a hunter’s moon on the day you were born? Give me a break, Yangchen.” Some day I had to ask her about that.

“How tall are you?”

It was a young, squeaky voice that broke me out of my thoughts. One of the eight year-olds from a class that my balcony overlooked was sitting at the other end of the table, resting his chin near the edge. They all had their heads shaved again that day, so he was idly rubbing his scalp all the while.

“Pretty tall,” I said. “Six and a half feet.” That was a low estimate, but it sounded better than the exact figure I could never quite remember.

“Is it because you’re the Avatar?”

“No, I was the Avatar when I was shorter, too.” He didn’t seem to get the joke. Well, I thought it was funny. “Everyone in my family is tall. But Avatar Yangchen was awfully short, so I don’t think the two things are related.”

That she was maybe five feet tall was probably the most accurate part of her biography I’d read so far. “Where’s Yun? She’s always with you.”

My stomach twinged at that. We  _were_  always together. “Good question.” I started rolling up the scrolls to put them back on their shelves. “Her note said she had something important to do, so I haven’t seen her all day. Where’re your friends?”

He shrugged as I slid the scrolls into place. “Then we’re going to have to be each other’s friends, aren’t we? What’s your name?”

“Bao. And you’re Kyoshi.”

Every time I thought I’d gotten used to that name, someone came along and pricked at the novelty of it. I liked what I’d chosen, it was a warm, comfortable thing. It was a shield as well, like my face paint or the padding in my kimono, but I tried not to think about it like that. It was just my name. Instead I gave him a nod and cinched my belt. “That’s me. And I don’t know about you, but I’m hungry.”

It didn’t take much to convince a young boy to eat, and soon enough he was leading the way to the dining hall. By the time we got there, most of the others had already finished dinner and had retired for the evening, though I noticed that Tian was still at the corner table, busy with tofu and snap peas. It was like she lived in the dining hall…a few monks looked askance at us while I fixed myself a plate of rice and vegetables—I still missed meat, or at least the idea of it—and pretended they weren’t as we sat down. I couldn’t fathom why, they’d all had a year to get used to me, and I was wearing their robes without any face paint. Apart from my height and the fact that my hair was brown instead of black, I blended right in. Other than being a woman, of course, but I was hardly the only one there.

“Grumpy old men,” I said under my breath, twirling my chopsticks to get them oriented properly in my hand.

Bao looked over his shoulder at them before pulling his collar up a little higher. “They told us not to bother you. Or Yun.”

“We’re not lepers…why? Because I’m the Avatar? Because she’s a nun?”

He shrugged. “One of the older acolytes said it was because you take your robes off a lot when you’re training.”

That explained me, I supposed. “And Yun?”

“They never really gave us a reason.”

“No.” I picked at my rice. “Of course not.”

Yun seemed even more disconnected from the temple than I was, all the more so with her mother there for the past two months. When we were around others, in the dining hall or the other shared parts of the complex, she closed up and hurried me along. It was only when we were alone—training, using the sauna, flying on Bima—that she brightened up again and became my sweet, friendly Yun. I still wasn’t sure why, I’d never seen anyone be rude to her or anything like that. Even the few tense moments when she and Tian were in the same room had the veneer of civility. Really though, everyone had been unfailingly polite to both of us for the entire year.

Of course, it wasn’t my world. It wasn’t a world of solid earth where someone got cracked across the jaw if they weren’t liked. Air Nomads didn’t throw punches. Air Nomads were polite. They could be so polite, in fact, that all the courtesies and niceties could create distance and isolation. All the manners became as much of a shield as my face paint, a tool to push away, to keep others at arm’s length. Maybe I should have been thinking about it like that the whole time.

At least when I had been taking punches, I knew who did and didn’t like me. I took a lot of them, but I knew. All the misdirection, the subtlety, the masks everybody wore at the temple…it made my head hurt sometimes. How anyone survived in that world from birth was beyond me. Maybe I was just a simpler person.

“How come you’re staring at your food?” Bao asked, pulling me back to the present moment.

I worked a bit of tofu free to dip in the soy sauce. “Thinking.”

He cleaned his plate and got up to get another. I didn’t notice Tian drifting over to me while he was on the other side of the room, and I only saw her when she claimed his seat across the table from me. She was detached from the temple like Yun, but she was only there temporarily, and her detachment seemed more like haughtiness than distance. Whatever the reason, she didn’t seem to have any problem approaching me.

“Avatar Kyoshi.”

“Abbess Tian. ‘Kyoshi’ is fine.” I didn’t know if there was a particular way I was supposed to  _feel_  as the Avatar, but having my title attached to my name as she insisted felt awkward, and that was after I had bargained her down from ‘Your Holiness.’ Of all the things I could have called myself,  _holy_  wasn’t chief among them. I still thought of myself as an earthbender, just one who happened to be able to bend everything else. Maybe that was how all the Avatars felt? I would’ve liked to be able to ask them.

“I was curious about something, I was hoping you could enlighten me.”

“I’m probably not any more enlightened than you are, but I’ll try,” I said. “What is it?”

“Why you came here instead of the Azuma or Nishi temples,” Tian said, smoothing out a wrinkle in the cuff of her robe. “Surely even in Chikyu they’re aware that this is a men’s temple? Of course you would have been welcome to live and train at one of the women’s temples.”

“This was the closest one,” I said, and it was true. Getting to Azuma would have taken weeks, even by sea. “And the easiest to get to from where I lived.”

She nodded sagely and steepled her fingers in front of her face. “Of course. We would be happy to host you at the Azuma temple if you were interested in learning some of the more weapons-oriented airbending forms.”

_I never knew there were airbending styles with swords and things like that._

_The world lost a great deal in their genocide, Korra._

“I think I’ll stick with the fans for now, thank you. Besides, I still need to learn firebending and proper waterbending.” The style I’d cobbled together to imitate waterbending worked…some of the time…and I could create small flames that would last if they had a fuel source, but I had to get better. I couldn’t do that in an air temple. “May I ask you something I was curious about?”

“By all means.”

“Why is Yun here?”

Trying to figure it out surreptitiously hadn’t worked so far, so I couldn’t be blamed for taking the direct approach. Her jaw set in a hard line and her gaze sharpened. “We’re nomads. We travel. This seemed like the best place for her at the time.”

“Right.” I wasn’t going to get answers that way, either. Maybe I was a bit too blunt. “Have a good evening.”

She gave me a little nod as I get up, stretching a tight, unconvincing smile across her lips. Killing with kindness, indeed.

The women’s dormitory was close to the dining hall and terribly silent. Yun must’ve still been wherever she’d run off to, and since Tian’s group took up in the wing the elders use, I was the only other resident. We had our pick of the rooms, and while Yun moved hers frequently—she  _was_  still a nomad, I supposed—I’d remained in what might have been a former abbess’s room near the end of the wing for the attached private bath. There was also a nice, heavy door that kept the chill out.

I sparked a flame in my palm and slipped it over to the candle beside my bed. It was a cozy little room, certainly better than an earthen lean-to or the hold of a ship. Oh, my soft, warm bed…how I would’ve liked to fall right down on it. I knew I shouldn’t, though. Instead I took a quick look in my bathtub, decided I probably didn’t need to replace the water left from my morning soak, and stoked a low fire in the coals underneath it.

My robes went flying into the corner, and I started unwinding my chest wrappings while the water heats up. They fell away too, allowing a cursory look over my body. It wasn’t the scars I minded very much anymore, it had become a kind of ritual where Yun would ask about one and I would explain it, it was my new shape. So much muscle gone…eggs and all the other bits of protein I could scrounge up weren’t enough to maintain my physique. It was still there, but leaner, and the defined ridges over my arms and stomach that I liked had softened. Once the water had steamed up and left some fog hanging over the room, I snuffed out the fire and eased my way in.

The water was hot, very hot, but I was able to sink in without problems up to my hips. I winced there before continuing, submerging up to the tip of my chin, and then sighed in relief as all the soreness from the day started to melt. The bathwater was more saline than drinkable water, so my legs and feet bobbed around a bit before breaking the surface at the far end. The extra salt was good for the skin, or so the monks said. It didn’t feel all that different when I swirled my hand around and splashed some on my face. Washing all my hair would take too long, so I just soaked for a while, idly working some soap under my arms, across my chest, and everywhere else it was needed when I could muster the energy. For a day when I didn’t  _have_  to do anything, it had sure felt like a long one.

A long, exhausting one. I didn’t know what Yun was playing at, leaving me alone all day. For so long I had been totally alone, surviving on scraps and getting beaten bloody for entertainment. That had finally changed, I finally had a friend, and she’d run off that morning with nothing more than a note slipped under my door. Part of me wanted to be angry, or upset, but I wasn’t. I only wanted to see her again. “Yun…”

I didn’t like where my hand was going, sliding down my stomach like that, but I couldn’t quite summon the wherewithal to stop it. I never could. No matter how dirty or lecherous I felt afterward, it was simply something that had to be done, or I might have gone mad. I tilted my head back against the padded lip of the bathtub and stared at the ceiling, counting the pockmarks in the stone and trying to remove myself from the experience as much as possible. It really should have been more fun.

_Wait, does she mean…_

_Yes, Bolin. It’s exactly what you think._

Try as I might, I couldn’t do it without prompting, so Yun flitted through my thoughts no matter how awful it made me feel to use her that way. Some friend I was. My fingers just went up and down, moving through the same rote motions as every other night. Jolts of guilty pleasure shot up into my belly until my hips bucked and short, panting breaths caught in my throat. It was a brief, unsatisfying climax as usual, but it was over and done with, and that was as relieving as the actual release of tension. The next day I definitely needed to replace the water.

“I’m so fucked up.”

I’d gotten my wash in, and sitting in a tepid pool with what was left of my arousal didn’t exactly appeal to me. The stopper came out of place with a little prompting from my toe, and I let the water drain around me until I was left shivering in an empty tub, looking down at my body again. What a mess. It was time for bed.

Whatever their towels were made of, it was some of the most comfortable cloth I’d ever felt. Once I was nice and dry, helped along by some clumsy waterbending, I went and got some nightclothes. The universe was at least kind enough to wait until I was dressed again before having someone knock on my door. It was as if it could sense that I was about to sleep and wanted desperately to interfere with that.

“Who is it?”

“Yun, can I come in? My hands are full.”

All the fatigue eating at me dissolved as I rushed over to the door. Yun was there in the hall, a package in one hand and some kind of gooey pastry in the other. She’d kept her hair short, even through the winter. It was so damn cute on her. “I missed you,” I blurted out, the first thing that sprang to mind.

“I baked you a fruit pie!” she said proudly, holding it out between us. “I used blueberries, but it always comes out purple for some reason.”

“Oh, well…thank you? Why’d you do that?”

I took a step back so she could come inside. “For your birthday.”

While I still didn’t have an excellent grasp of the Air Nomad calendar, I knew my birthday was at least two months prior by its count. She was quick to add, “I know you never told me your actual birthday, but you’ve been here for a year now, so it had to be some time, right?”

“Makes sense.” She could have checked, obviously, it was the same day that Avatar Kuruk died, but she’d never pried into my life like that. And I supposed that even if it wasn’t  _my_  birthday, the day I had showed up at the temple was still  _Kyoshi’s_  birthday. Yun sat on the side of my bed and put the package on my nightstand while I closed the door. She was beaming, the nearby candle casting all manner of silly lines across her face, and I couldn’t help but smile when I sat beside her. “So, is this where you were all day? The kitchens?”

“Only part of the time, I had to take Bima to the village so I could get your present—ah! Pie first,” she said, producing two small spoons from a pocket in her robes.

“I don’t know what to say, I haven’t done this in years…thank you, Yun.”

She handed me one of the spoons and started in on the gooey part of the pie, which looked to be somewhere between a cream and a filling, but with most of it above rather than within the crust. It was sweet, almost sickly so, but she made it for me and that meant it was perfect.

“And we get to do it again next year when you turn twenty! If—if you’re still here, that is,” she said, sorrow creeping into her voice as we started working on the pie crust.

“What makes you think I won’t be, or that I won’t come back? I’m no master airbender. The spinning gates still smack me around as often as not. Don’t think you’re getting out of teaching me that easily.”

Yun smiled and bumped my arm, but we both knew I’d have to leave some time. Even though I was sure I’d never actually be asked to go, I couldn’t very well master firebending and waterbending there. “You  _are_  pretty bad,” she teased.

“Careful. I’m still your Avatar.”

She rolled her eyes and offered me a bit of the filling from her spoon. “You’re my friend first,” Yun said, resting her head against my arm. “My very, very tall friend. My Kyoshi.”

“Mm.”

I had the fruit pie in my lap, but it laid untouched for several minutes while we sat quietly. Eventually I put it on the nightstand and noticed that Yun had dozed off right against me, the poor tired thing. Carefully, so as not to disturb her too much, I tucked her in on the side of my bed, and then went around to settle in on the other edge. I’d barely snuffed out the candle when Yun groaned and shifted toward me, continuing across the bed until she’d nuzzled securely against me. She was so adorable…some less innocent thoughts ran across my mind, which made me glad that I had dealt with my own selfish needs already. I wrapped my arms securely around her, held her tight, and drifted off.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think the implication that Jinora, Ikki and Meelo are still there listening as Kyoshi blithely describes her masturbatory habits, with everyone getting more and more uncomfortable, is hilarious


	11. Of Weak Flesh and Resolute Will

The light beaming through my little slit of a window told me it was well past dawn when I finally woke up. I was a little confused, since whatever was up against me under the sheets felt nothing like the pillow I liked to cuddle when I slept. Something was in my face, too, soft and itching at my nose. Hair, I realized. Yun’s hair, with the rest of her pressed up into my chest.

“Oh, right…”

As slowly as I could—slowly because it felt so damn good, having her body right beside mine—I rolled my hips away, and then the rest of my body. I wasn’t subtle enough, and she shifted in her sleep to curl up to me again. I chanced a light pat on her head, which woke her up. Oops.

“Good morning,” she mumbled into my nightshirt before she noticed my ragged breathing. “Are you all right? Something wrong?”

Yun wriggled back in her wrinkled robes as I sat up. “Fine. Waking up next to someone is different, that’s all. It’s nice.”

She nodded and sat up beside me, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes. I’d never seen her so soon after waking up, it was so endearing. She stretched out like a cat after a nap, yawning and flexing without a care in the world. The bottom of her upper robes rode up when she brought her arms over her head, putting her taut little tummy on display. “Sorry about imposing last night,” she said, untangling a few beads in the chain of her pendant.

“Nothing to be sorry for.”

I scratched at my cheek, and Yun hopped out of bed. Where did they get their energy in the mornings? “Let me wash up and get some new robes, then we can open your present!”

Once she retrieved the socks she’d kicked off in the night, she slipped away to her room, leaving me alone with the color rising in my cheeks. Well, that was…surprisingly pleasant. I had to sit for a moment to let my heart calm down.

I washed up, worked a little with my razor, and braided my hair before Yun returns, and I could see her waiting in my looking-glass as I finished dressing. The little green feather I bought for her months prior is still with her, slightly frayed around the sides, tucked into her belt. Mine was in its usual pocket inside my kimono, over my heart. Yun started rocking from side to side on my bed until I came back, and she practically threw the plainly wrapped package at me when I sat down. There was some heft to it, and I started opening it up since she looked ready to burst with anticipation. Anyone watching would think she was the one getting the gift.

The paper tore easily enough, as did the next layer, and inside was a pair of metal fans, leafed in gold. My breath caught in my throat. I picked one up, tested the weight, and unfolded it. It had my name inscribed along the edge, and the rivet even had the heraldry of the Earth Kingdom writ small upon it. The way they caught the light, they were so beautiful…

“I had you practice with the metal fans so much last month so I could see what weight worked best,” Yun said, holding up the other fan and flicking her wrist to expand it. “I know you don’t  _need_  them anymore, but I thought you’d like—Kyoshi? Why are you crying?”

So that was what the burning in my eyes was. A few tears plinked down on the ribs of the fan in my lap, and I felt my breath coming back in short, painful gasps. “I never got any gifts,” I said, my voice ready to break. “Thank you, thank you—”

Yun was happy to return my crushing hug after moving the fans over to my nightstand. “You’re welcome,” she said through a wheeze, which prompted me to loosen up a little. We were closer in height when sitting down, so she didn’t have to pitch her head back as far to look at me. “Kyoshi?”

“Hmm?”

“Can I…” She unlinked her arms from around me and wrung her hands. “Can I kiss you?”

All the sugar from last night had my stomach in a knot. Yes, that was it. Our gazes met for an instant before separating again. Her face was all kinds of red, and I was sure mine wasn’t any better. I’d never done anything of the sort…not willingly, anyway. Yun was squirming in place as the moments trickled by, fearing my silence, before I stroked her cheek and answered her in little more than a whisper.

“One kiss.”

I almost expected—wanted—her to balk at my condition, but she nodded without a word and turned all the way toward me, biting at her lip. So cute. As if she really thought I would say no. We had several false starts where we both moved forward, only to stop and wait for the other to keep going. My heart had picked up its pace again by the time I hooked a finger into her collar and eased her toward me. Our noses bumped, and a few laughs got through her shaky breathing. “You don’t have to if you don’t want to, I didn’t mean to put you on the spot.”

“Hush.”

I leaned in to close the distance, and I felt a crack form in the floor under my foot when her lips pressed to mine. One of us moaned, I wasn’t sure who, and then her hands were on my shoulders, fingers digging in through my kimono to keep me in place, as if I was going to run off. I could taste the sweetness on her lips, smell the slightly salty scent of her nervous sweat…it was a heady mix. Her tongue flitted nervously over my lips, and she pressed us as close as could be when I relented and allowed her in.

My heart was going well and truly mad by then. Her cheeks were flushed and warm as I cupped them in my hands. Apart from the sounds of us shifting around on the bed to keep our balance, everything was quiet. Without breaking away, Yun threw one leg over me and shifted herself so that she was in my lap, using her grip on my shoulders for balance. As impressive as her acrobatics were, I needed to breathe after a few moments. She followed me when I pulled away, mewling softly before throwing her arms around me and burying her face in my collar. I squeezed her tight around the waist, both of us panting while we rested against each other, locked in an embrace.

“You’re a good kisser,” Yun said, rocking her hips from side to side. The motion wasn’t helping and she knew it, the devious little thing. The flame in my core that usually stayed at a low, steady burn until nighttime was starting to mount.

“And on my first try.”

“Wait, you never…?” I shook my head. One of her hands ran over the nape of my neck, and I shivered. “Maybe you need another lesson, then.”

“I said  _one_  kiss, Yun.”

Neither of us were very surprised when I didn’t protest the second kiss, or the third or fourth. It was only when she pushed me down onto the bed, hands tracing along my stomach, that I panicked and wormed my way out from under her. “Stop, stop, stop—!”

“I’m sorry,” she blurted out, backing away so fast that she went right into the wall. Tears started forming at the corners of her eyes as she bit her lip again and fiddled with a fold in her robes. My heart was pounding once more, in a bad way, and it took several deep breaths to stay in the present moment. “I didn’t mean to push, do you—do you not like women that way?”

She only came back to the bed when I sat up and patted the space beside me, and even then each step was reluctant, cautious, like a puppy who’d just had her tail stepped on. Her eyes were still watery. She was shaking when she sat, and I held her for a few minutes until she calmed down.

“No, I do like women, Yun. Men, women, it doesn’t make a difference to me. After so many lifetimes I’m sure it all gets muddled up, but that’s not why I stopped you. I…I don’t have the best experience with being shoved down and touched,” I said, shrugging my arms out of my kimono, letting it fall to my waist so each scar and line on my torso was plainly visible. “Besides, I’m a mess. You shouldn’t go after me just because I’m the only other woman here.”

“Do you think I care about scars?”

My chest wraps started loosening up as I hunched over. “There are a lot of them.”

“Kyoshi, that’s not what’s important to me, I like  _you_ , not because you’re the only woman here and not because of what scars you have or don’t have.” Slowly, gently, she took the end of the wraps and, when I didn’t protest, unwound them until they fell into my lap. I took a deep, shuddering breath as she pulled me into a sidelong hug. She made a point not to press down on my breasts or the old marks around them. “Though I think they’re charming, really…”

“I don’t deserve you, Yun.” Her only response was a small, absent hum before her arms tightened around me. “What’re you thinking about?”

“How much I want to kiss you again,” she admitted, which got a laugh from me.

“You don’t have to ask permission, silly. I trust you. But go slower, all right?”

She nodded, and I laid back to watch her strip off the top half of her robes and crawl over until she was looking right down at me, her warm breath drawing up goosebumps on my skin. It really should have been a sin to look as good as she did in the hazy morning light, small breasts rising and falling when she paused, meeting my gaze with those beautiful blue eyes of hers. “You’re not a very good nun, are you?”

Yun screwed up her face, as if she were really thinking about it. “I guess not,” she finally said, legs tightening around my hips. “You’ll have to punish me.”

I grinned and slid my hands along her bare back while she dipped down for another kiss. She was a little bolder then, making her profile as low as possible so she was almost laying on top of me, and she was so  _warm_ …a gasp ran through her when I raked my nails along the tiny ridges of her spine.

Her lips were sweet and hot, oh so susceptible to a few light nibbles. Her bangs fell out of place when she shuddered, making her short hair look even messier than usual. She sat up again, undoing her belt with one hand and tracing the ridges on my stomach with the other. The way she rocked her hips against mine…I couldn’t believe I’d gone a whole year with just my fantasies. I grabbed her around the waist and pulled her down again, putting us both on our sides. Yun was all smiles from being picked up and handled. “Now, how to punish you…”

“You could keep tossing me around,” she said, tracing the outline of my breast. Then, with the sarcasm laid on thick, “I hate that.”

“I have a better idea.”

Yun had less muscle than me, and her tummy was much smoother than mine as my hand glided down the middle of it. Her lip was going to bleed with the way she was biting it, and she rolled her hips forward as I slipped under her pants. I kissed her hard once more and her legs parted instinctively, but I paused, content to savor all the little tastes of her lips and tongue for a moment. She wasn’t so patient, and it wasn’t long before she was shaking again and trying to maneuver me closer to the warmth between her legs. All the while I was kissing along her neck, lightly licking at her collarbone, catching one of her stiff little nipples between my teeth—finally she scrambled to get her pants off and sent them flying across the room, which told me the anticipation had drawn on long enough.

I’d seen her naked before, but seeing here there in my room was another matter entirely. It was like she’d stepped out of a painting, all graceful curves and the most exquisitely expectant look on her face. “Kyoshi,” she gasped out, throwing one arm over my side, “J-just touch me, please…”

Oh, she was absolutely soaked, letting my fingers move easily until I found the little knot of pleasure above her sex, making her gasp and grab harder at my back, leaving sharp, narrow scratches in the wake of her nails. Every motion, every quick kiss I laid on her neck, worked at me as much as her, sending my own hips rocking in time with hers. Yun squirmed under my touch, whispering “softer” in between her cute little moans. Maybe I couldn’t be as direct with her as I was with myself. Whatever the reason, I lightened up, touching around her clit, applying the barest pressure before moving farther down. She was only too happy to push on my fingers, trying to move things along, but she’d spent a year telling me what a virtue patience was. She could wait.

“Kyoshi…”

At least she was pronouncing my name properly. I thought of a better use for her mouth, though. Yun almost melted into another deep, hungry kiss, parting her lips to let me in. Her tongue pressed back against mine, playfully fighting for dominance, but she lost that battle when I slipped two fingers into her warm, waiting sex. She kicked her leg in response, sending out a rush of air so fast and so sharp it cut off the top of the candle on my nightstand.

Tremors wracked her whole body when I hooked my fingers inside her, pushing forward the slightest amount while the heel of my palm rested on her clit. It was such a simple motion, rocking my hand back and forth like I did for myself, but so very effective. Feeling her, watching her and listening to her had me going too, dampness coating my thighs as I rocked my hips. Yun broke our kiss and buried her face in the bed sheets, her whimpering and laughing almost bordering on tears. I slowed down in case it was too much for her, but she turned back to me, glassy-eyed, and compensated by pushing her hips toward me. “Don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t stop…”

Well, if she could handle it…my pace picked up a little, and I brushed against her a little more directly. Her gasp broke into a wide, dumb grin, and her nails scratched harder along my back. With time to adjust, she pressed more on my hand and squeezed tighter around my fingers. She must have needed it, and badly.

“Such a pretty girl,” I whispered, nibbling at her ear. Yun whimpered and twisted at every tiny movement, her back arching in plain, desperate desire. My hand worked a little faster, soaked with her arousal. “So beautiful. Do you like my fingers in your cunt, Yun?”

“Mmhmm!”

“Filthy little thing,” I said, my voice little more than a growl, and she loved it. “So eager, so wet. I’m going to have so much fun with your mouth…”

“Ahh, Kyoshi please, please, I’m gonna—”

The rest of it caught in her throat and came out as a long, happy moan. Yun bit down on my shoulder to ride out her climax, almost breaking the skin when my hand twitched as I slid it out of her. She wasn’t trembling anymore, but every few seconds an aftershock ran up her spine and drew out a shiver. “Good girl,” I said, lightly kissing the top of her head. “Very good girl. You can consider yourself punished.”

“You have a very interesting idea of discipline,” Yun mumbled, taking long, deep breaths to steady herself. I worked the kink out of my wrist and brought my hand up, but she descended on my fingers and licked them clean before I could do it myself. How considerate of her. “And a filthy mouth.”

I shrugged. “I was in the moment.”

“Can I tell you something?”

“Mm.”

“I’ve wanted you to do that for a long time,” she admitted, blushing for some inconceivable reason. She was already laid out in front of me naked as the day she was born, I thought we were past embarrassment at that point.

“Oh?” I asked, playing along. She yelped as I wrapped my arm around her and pulled her closer, right up to my chest. “And how long is a long time?”

“Um…a year.”

Yun curled up to me as I rolled onto my back. So sweet. “I thought as much.”

“Are you thinking of anything else?” she asked, laying one hand on my leg, still covered by my kimono, squeezing intermittently as she moved up my thigh. The teasing, noncommittal little noise I made only seemed to encourage her. Yun looked up at me as her hand settled on my belt. “Can I take this off?”

“You’d better, I want to see what that smart little mouth of yours can do.” I  _was_  overdressed, after all. I was starting to push away the fabric when a long, low bell echoed out across the temple. Yun perked up, still holding my belt but otherwise with her attention elsewhere. Really? Right that moment? So much for reciprocity. “Who died this time?”

“No one, that bell means they finally got a unanimous vote,” Yun said, idly flicking at my belt before her eyes widened and a smile grew on her lips. “And that means my mother will finally be going home.”

Someone else might not have understood her poorly restrained glee, but I’d never missed an opportunity to put distance between myself and my own mother, either. Yun jumped out of bed to gather her clothes, leaving me to fix my wraps and kimono. She looked as good getting into clothes as she did getting out of them, I had no idea how she did it. For a moment I considered taking care of myself quickly, but she could make it up to me later.

We were late in cleaning up and getting to the main courtyard, where everyone else had already assembled. A few people noticed our arrival, but for the most part we got lost in the crowd while Tian put the thin white abbot’s cord around another elder’s neck. I remembered his name being Zhi or Zhu or something like that. They all began to blend into each other after a while. Haan was there beside him, looking so desperately relieved that it was hard not to hope he got a good long nap after everything.

There was a smattering of polite applause before the remaining elders retired to select a new fifth member, which they would do without outside help. With the excitement over, everyone else started to disperse until only Tian’s group, Yun, and myself remained in the courtyard. Jie and Shiei mumbled something about getting their bison ready and made a quick exit, the cowards. The tension from the remaining two nuns seemed to actually be holding the air still around us.

“Have a safe flight, Mother,” Yun said, suddenly very interested in the tilework at our feet. She had hunched over, as if she was trying to make herself as small as possible.

Tian had her hands hidden in her sleeves, and maintained a veneer of serenity as she looked between us. “I had planned on you coming with us, Yun.”

“W-what?” Yun’s gaze shot up, first to her mother, then to me, and then back to Tian. “Come back to the Azuma temple?”

“You can’t very well get your arrows here, can you?” A light breeze made the tassel on her cord sway. Tian’s arrows had a slightly different style compared to the ones the monks had, with more slight curves as opposed to the men’s straighter lines. “I’ve asked the elders, I know you’ve tested out of the thirty-sixth tier, to say nothing of having trained the Avatar.”

Yun looked at the back of her hand, where one arrow would have been. She’d never lamented not having them, though sometimes I caught her tracing the path they would take on her arms and legs. She deserved them, of course, but there was an oddness in Tian’s voice that had me on edge. Yun seemed to pick up on the same thing and ran her hand through her hair. “I guess I could keep working with Kyoshi at home, would you want to come with me to the Eastern Air Temple?”

_Of course_ , I wanted to say, but Tian beat me to the punch. “I’m bringing  _you_  back, Yun. The Avatar still has waterbending and firebending to learn. She can’t do that at the temple.”

My stomach turned a little. I could be refused, it seemed. “Oh,” Yun said, doing her best to stay collected. “That’s what this is about. I think I’ll stay here then, Mother.”

“I wasn’t asking. Here or there, I’m still your abbess, and you’re still my charge.”

“I’m your  _daughter_ ,” she said, biting back with an edge I’d never heard from her before. It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. “It’s not enough to send me away, now you want to drag me back over your rules?”

Whatever civility they had been managing was gone, bubbling over into outright anger. That was about the time when my parents would crack me across the face, but neither of them did much beyond glare. Air Nomads didn’t throw punches. Air Nomads were polite.

“Clearly you’ve learned nothing from your time here. These aren’t my rules, they’re our rules. Rules you agreed to follow when you chose to join the temple.”

“What choice did I have?” Yun asked, her voice rising to an angry, breaking pitch. Some monks on the next terrace were at the railing, drawn by their argument. “You live there, we don’t have any other family, I couldn’t go and live with my father because you still won’t tell me who he is—”

She was shouting too much to see Tian’s gaze flash over to me for an instant.

“I didn’t have anywhere else to go. I never had any  _choice_ ,” she said, balled-up hands shaking. “But I do now. You’re right, Kyoshi has more bending styles to learn. And she’ll need someone to fly her around while she learns them.”

Yun grabbed my hand and led me off before either of us could really reflect on the implications of what she’d said. Tian was just standing there, fuming, giving me a glare that could cut glass when I looked over my shoulder at her. The day had been going so well thirty minutes prior.

I only got my hand back when Yun went into her room, muttering about packing her things. There wasn’t much in the way of worldly possessions for me, my face paint, a few changes of clothes, the beautiful new fans Yun got me…I rushed back to my own room and packed everything into my bag, plus one of the comfortable towels from my bathroom. It was a shame I couldn’t take the bed, too, but Yun’s door slammed before I could think about it too much. She didn’t even come get me that time, and I had to run after her to the kitchens.

The monks inside jumped when Yun stormed in, but didn’t protest when she hiked a package of rice over her shoulder, grabbed another bag of food, and marched back out. They might have been too taken aback to really do anything. Either way, I jogged to the stables to keep up with her. Bima stopped sniffing at Hantei and came lumbering over when she smelled Yun, but whined when her mistress ignored her and ran into the stables for her saddle instead. Jie and Shiei were standing by their own bison, looking over at us.

“Yun!”

She was dragging the damn thing out by herself, legs ready to buckle under the weight. I ran over to split the weight with her, but she was already sliding it along Bima’s spine until it fell into the grooves there. Rapid blasts of air sent its straps flying under the bison’s stomach, and Yun stalked around Bima’s tail to go lash them to the other side of the saddle. I could see Tian at the entrance to the temple proper once I climbed into the saddle, under the archway there, any remaining composure buried under naked fury. Yun didn’t spare her a glance while she checked the reins fastened around Bima’s horns. “Where are we going?”

“Oh, I…Hitenno,” I said, taking the map from Yun’s bag. “We’ll go to the Fire Nation.”

The reins cracked, and then we were soaring away. She looked back at the saddle every so often to check the map at my side, but otherwise she stared out into the endless sea and sky in front of us, anger giving over to exhaustion after a few hours. I wished that I knew what to say to her.

We chanced upon a small atoll shortly before it got too dark to see, and picked out an island to make camp on barely large enough to hold more than a few small houses. Yun took care of Bima while I gathered some wood and stoked a small fire. We hadn’t taken anything to prepare food with, but I found a few rocks to bend into some crude cookware.

“I’m going to steam the snap peas,” I said when Yun sat down beside me. It was apparently very much the  _wrong_  thing to say, because it was what finally broke through and sent her spiraling into loud, inelegant sobbing. Maybe she wanted carrots…I held her to my side, letting her shudder and cry herself out into my kimono. The way she was gripping the fabric made her fingers dig into my side, but I said nothing and let her get it all out. What a day it had been.

Yun calmed herself down eventually and let me out of her grip so I could cook dinner. Vegetables didn’t make for much of a meal in and of themselves, but there was some sauce in our bag of purloined supplies, so they were filling enough. Once we finished, we stayed sitting there for a while, staring into the fire’s dying embers in silence until Yun spoke.

“It was…three years ago now, I guess?”

“What?” I asked, turning to her. She didn’t acknowledge me and only continued to stare dimly into the glowing cinders.

“My friend Li and I had just tested out of the thirty-first airbending tier, so we decided to celebrate,” Yun said. Her voice had no anger like it did at the temple, but it was frighteningly flat. “We went into the town at the base of the Azuma temple, and maybe we had too much sake, but before we flew back, she pushed me up against a wall and kissed me, and…I liked it. I liked it a  _lot_.”

She started fiddling with one of the links on her pendant’s chain. “I’ve never been interested in men at all, so I thought I would be a nun and that would be it, but being kissed like that wasn’t like anything I had ever felt before. Like everything before that moment was me sleeping, and being kissed woke me up. I thought it might have been because we were drunk, but I liked kissing her even more when I was sober. So we kept doing it, kissing and…the other stuff, but I guess we weren’t subtle enough, because my mother caught us.”

“That’s why she sent you away? Because you like women?”

“We have a whole chakra devoted to love, but as soon as you go and love someone, the wrong someone who’s a girl instead of a boy, it’s sexual misconduct, and they call you a deviant.”

The thought crossed my mind to fly to the Azuma temple and go upside Tian’s head. Yun sighed and leaned against me. “She said if I wanted to kiss girls like a boy, she was going to treat me like a boy. So she shaved my head and sent me to a men’s temple,” she said, idly threading our fingers together. The dispassion in her voice, the absence of its usual cheery lilt, was breaking my heart. “But then I met you, so…I’m still grateful for everything that’s happened, in a way.”

Yun reached up and planted a light, fleeting kiss on my cheek. Such a sweet little thing. If I was going to be responsible for stewarding the world for the rest of my life, maybe I could try and make it better for people like her.

⁂

“Air Nomads wouldn’t do that!”

I glance over my shoulder, toward a topiary where the children have been listening despite me sending them away for the evening. The oldest one looks nervously indignant, though whether from her outburst or from being caught eavesdropping I can’t say. She shuffles over to her father. “They wouldn’t do that…would they?”

“Go ahead, tell her,” I say to Tenzin. “Tell them what the Air Nomads thought of women like Yun and me. Tell them all the nice names they had for us.”

Everyone looks to be on edge now, especially Korra and Asami. I doubt my tone is helping, but I don’t care. I’m angry now. “Jinora, that was a long time ago—”

“Tell them, or I will.”

He stays silent while Korra tries to intercede. “Listen, it’s pretty late, maybe we should all go get some dinner.”

I keep myself manifested despite her efforts. “ _Deviant_  and  _pervert_  were the kindest ones. There were plenty more things no one would say to our faces. You may not think like them, child, but do not let anyone tell you the Air Nomads were faultless saints.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> #NotAllAirNomads


	12. Princes

“Oh, come back. I have no grudge against you.”

Jinora trudges over to the Bagua circle, nervously rubbing her arm before she sits down beside Korra. “I’m sorry for interrupting,” she mumbles, staring into her lap.

“I may have been blunter than was necessary yesterday,” I say. Korra seems to think so, at any rate, and made sure I knew it. “So I apologize for snapping at you and your father. But I have no reason to doubt what I was told. Mine was a different time, and I have no intention of glossing over the parts you may find unpleasant. Please, stay. We’re about to meet a few more of my friends.”

Bolin’s hand shoots up. “Oohh, question!”

“You don’t need to raise your hand, I’m not a teacher.”

“Didn’t you have a kid?” he asks. “Because, I mean, you and Yun were both girls, and—”

He makes some kind of motion with his hands, spreading his first two fingers and then pushing the gaps between them together, until Asami groans and grabs one of his hands to stop him.

“Yes, I had a daughter,” I say, and pain starts clawing at my heart. I had hoped to avoid talking about her for as long as I could. “I never would have won any awards for good mothering. But you’re asking about her father?”

“I was curious,” he admits. “None of the books about you in the library here talk about him.”

“We will get to everything in due course, including Koko and her father. My family is…not a happy or easy subject for me.”

⁂

Yes, I decided, waking up cuddling Yun was much better than cuddling my pillow. We had slept on sand and I wasn’t proficient enough to bend it yet, so there was a good deal of stretching once the sun rose. Or, once I think it had risen. It was a gray, overcast kind of morning, with clouds obscuring the sky. “We should’ve taken more blankets,” Yun said as she worked a kink out of her neck. “Maybe a pillow or two.”

I wiped some sand from my arm. Yun hadn’t fared much better, with sand all over her cheek and bare chest. “Let’s keep that in mind for the next angry exit we make.”

The whole island started shaking, and I dug my feet into the sand to see what was happening. No earthquake, perhaps there was a volcano nearby? We couldn’t have been in Fire Nation territory already. Yun figured it out before me, tapping on my shoulder and pointing a little farther down the beach. Bima had found a jellyfish, and was alternating between sniffing at it and jumping away as quickly as a creature of her size could. “No, that’s not food!” Yun said, though it failed to deter Bima in her game. “Oh, she’s got five stomachs, she’ll be fine. Are you hungry?”

What a silly question. I lit the fire again and let the water from last night come to a boil so we could make some rice. Yun stared out at the open ocean, watching the waves roll in while I bent a crude lid for our cooking pot. “Something on your mind?”

“This is like when I was going to the southern temple,” she said as I settled in next to her. “Taking Bima from Qingwa Island into Earth Kingdom territory, and then back down to the southern archipelago. It was a little different though, I had a bunch of cooked food and clean water instead of an Avatar.”

“I’m not a very good cook.”

“That’s all right.” She nuzzled into my shoulder. “I like it better this way.”

“We’ll see if you feel the same after you taste my rice,” I said with a grin. An especially large wave crashed onto the shore and came up to our bare feet. “This isn’t strange for you? Running off to the Fire Nation with the Avatar, away from everything you’ve known?”

“My mother exiled me when I was fifteen and made everyone treat me like a boy for three years. _Strange_ is starting to lose some of its meaning.”

Her voice didn’t flatten out or rise to an angry pitch, so it must have been easier for her to talk about with the initial outpouring behind her. There was one piece of the puzzle she hadn’t supplied the night before, and I figured I could try to get it then. I rested my hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry. I’m probably not the best person to talk about _strange_ , either. But what you said last night, about your friend…you loved her?” I asked, somewhat overcautious.

“ _Love_. Not  _loved_. I still do, and I miss her every day,” Yun said, looking down into her lap until her mind caught up with her mouth. “Oh—no, Kyoshi, I didn’t mean…ugh.”

She buried her head in her hands, and I gave her shoulder a little squeeze. “Don’t get yourself worked up, I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t want to know. I don’t think it’s impossible to care about more than one person at once,” I said, and that got a small smile.

_Hey, you should’ve tried that line, Mako!_

_Shut up, Bolin._

“You know, we never finished things up yesterday…”

The wicked little grin she was going for was positively silly on her, as was the indignant look she made in response to my laughter. I ran my hand through her soft, short hair. “No, we didn’t. But we’re about to eat, and the sand would get everywhere. So let’s wait, all right?”

Yun nodded, and I tightened my grip a little, getting a gasp in response. “But you’re not off the hook,” I whispered, planting the lightest kiss I could on her cheek. “All right, the water’s boiling.”

As much as I would have liked to let our little dance play out, I really was hungry. Yun finished getting dressed while I kept an eye on the rice, and I sighed in relief when I found some sauce in our supplies. The rice they grew near the temple was so bland sometimes that I couldn’t choke it down dry. It all seemed so familiar, waking up next to water, scrounging together a meal…a selfish part of me thought I was done eking out an existence, what with being the Avatar and all. Based on the things I’d read, we never had to worry much about material needs after being discovered. I looked over once I was done pouring out the rice and saw Yun struggling to get her robe over her head, putting her body on display while she twisted and turned. Roughing it wasn’t all bad, of course.

Eventually she figured it out and took the crude earthen bowl I had made for her. “So where are we going in the Fire Nation?” she asked, stirring in some sauce for herself.

“Um…” I hadn’t given much thought to that the day before, I’d been too concerned Yun would have another conniption at the reins. The whole time I’d had some nebulous idea of a training ground somewhere, maybe a repurposed Agni Kai arena at the foot of a volcano, but in truth I knew next to nothing about Hitenno beyond the fact that it was a bunch of volcanic islands. “The nearest temple I guess, there’s probably no shortage of them. Wherever we can find some Fire Sages. They’re supposed to work for me, right?”

Yun retrieved her map and laid it out in front of us, placing my cookware on the corners to keep it from blowing away in the wind that had picked up. “I know there’s a temple in the capital, but it’s a long way there. We could find another one on one of the other islands, but it could take time.”

“Let’s figure it out when we’re closer. Someone should be able to point us in the right direction once we’re there.”

“Well,” Yun began, brushing some hair out of her face, “I don’t speak Hitennese, and I’m guessing that you don’t, either.”

I could barely cobble together a sentence in Tochi from what Yun had tried to teach me, to say nothing of a language I’d never heard before. Learning the common script that Chikyan, Tochi and Hitennese shared had been difficult enough. I hadn’t even bothered trying to stumble through Shuishei, either. “We can worry about that later, too. Maybe a past life will come along and teach it to me.”

She straightened up a little. “Have you gotten through to any of them? It’s kind of interesting being related to Yangchen, I’ve always wondered what she was like. And my mother never talked about Kuruk, but he was probably interesting, too.”

“No, they’re not being very talkative,” I said. “We might have to do this one on our own.”

The end of my braid whipped into my face, along with a blistering rush of wind. It was wet and salty, coming in from the ocean as it was, and more powerful than I thought before I’d been paying attention to it. Yun managed to grab the map before it blew away, but a stronger wave crashed in and soaked it.

What had been a calm, if overcast, sky a few moments before became a dark and foreboding storm cell over rough, choppy waters. Bima couldn’t take off in it, even if we could get her to try. She was such a baby sometimes.

“Can you tell whatever storm spirit this is that we’re sorry for whatever we did?” Yun shouted, her voice half-lost to the wind.

If only it worked that way. My attention went to a little shape being tossed around on the waves, rolling helplessly on the surf. It was too far out to tell much, but its shape was too regular to be an animal. Some kind of boat, maybe. It looked blue, but that could have been the water around it as much as the paint. I could only see it for a few moments before a large wave picked up the whole thing and sent it crashing into another island in the atoll.

Yun saw it too, but there wasn’t much we could do about it yet. Going into the water would be a death sentence. I grabbed my fans and turned my body in a tight spiral, trying to remember not to throw my weight like I would for earthbending. Some of the water in front of me parted like a knife went through it, but my impact on the air was harder to measure. Some of the rain seemed to shift direction, though that might have been from the wind. Yun was having a much more noticeable effect, striking upward with large, graceful turns and punching holes in the clouds as a result. Circular motions, circular motions…come on, I could do _something_.

I made a larger, fuller turn, flicking my wrists to move the fans, and the howling wind fell silent around me. The little hairs on the back of my neck stood up, and I knew I had to do something with all the energy. I dropped my hands too fast, though, and all the held-back air went rushing into the sand at my feet, sending me above and across the tiny island. Good idea, bad execution. I could have fallen on the sand and twisted my ankle, or fallen in the water and floundered at the mercy of an undertow.

A few spurts of flame sprang from my feet when I kicked my legs out, but it wasn’t enough to break my fall entirely. I tried to roll across the sand, but in the process my right elbow came down hard on a sharp rock half-buried on the beach. The shock carried upward before my whole arm went jutting out of place, with a blast of hot, searing pain to go with it. It licked at my shoulder and torso like fire under my skin, and I could barely get a whimper out as I fell onto my other side.

My face ground into the sand from all my twisting and turning to try and dull the pain, and just to add insult to injury a wave struck me full-force before I could recover. I went rolling again, hitting my arm with such exquisite pain that I saw stars. There was a moment where I was dimly aware of blood dripping from my elbow and into the sleeve of my kimono, but it was a dull, far-off thing. I tried to take a deep breath and got a mouthful of sand for my trouble.

Once I got onto my back, I could see some of the clouds parting, and the remaining ones looked like loose knitting with so many holes punched in them. The wind screamed around me, carrying the rain with it in a fury of air and water. My arm cried in protest at every tiny motion, but I stood in time to see Yun spin all the clouds out and away from the atoll. Very talented, indeed.

She made one final push, and nudged away enough of the cloud cover to allow some sunlight through. I spat out most of the sand in my mouth and made my way back to our camp, where Yun was breathing heavily and looking over at whatever it was that had wrecked nearby.

“Yun, you…that was amazing.”

I ruffled her hair a bit, though it was hard to tell with how windswept it was. “Thanks. I’ve always had an easy time with water—your arm!”

My sleeve was as red as it was green, and she rolled it up so we could see the damage. There was a narrow gash extending from my elbow halfway down my forearm in the shape of a spiral. The first morbid thought I had was that it would make an interesting scar, but I refrained from sharing that. “Never mind the blood, I think my shoulder dislocated,” I said, and no sooner had the words left my mouth than another dizzying spate of pain ripped through my shoulder and chest. “Can you help me put it back in place?”

Yun bit her lip as I shrugged off my kimono and got down on my back. “I don’t know how to do what you need.”

“I’ve done it plenty of times, I’ll talk you through it.” I laid my arm out at my side. “Sit there, brace your legs with one under my arm and one against my neck.”

She did so. “All right, now hold my wrist with one hand and my arm above my elbow with the other. Pull, gently.” It was a sick kind of agony spreading through my torso, but I bore it with a straight face so she didn’t think she was hurting me. “Now—now move it to your left, until you have it perpendicular with my body.”

The joint made an audible  _pop_ , and much of the pain vanished as my arm slipped back into place. A tear I had been holding back rolled down my cheek. “Good job, Yun,” I said through a long sigh. “Very good. Sorry about getting your hands all bloody.”

Some discomfort persisted, but not nearly as much as before. I sat up again, pulled on my sleeve, and gave my arm a few cautious flexes while Yun washed her hands in the waves. There was nothing to make a proper sling from, so I tucked my arm into my kimono once I got dressed to keep it level. “We should go see what crashed over there,” Yun said as she packed up our things. I collapsed all of our crude earthen cookware into a single rock before helping to get Bima saddled. There was still a little rain pattering down, but nothing she couldn’t fly through.

Yun pointed to the next island in the atoll while scratching Bima’s head. “Right there, girl.”

She lurched forward enough to glide a few feet over the water, so low that some of the waves splashed across her hooves. It was a short distance, and when we got there Bima found a section of beach not littered with wood from the wreck. There was much more than I would have expected from a simple skiff, though I was no shipwright and it might have been a perfectly appropriate amount of wood. Some pieces were painted a deep blue, along with a large white threefold tomoe to serve as heraldry. Water Tribe.

The two people lying in the wreckage blended in so well with their blue parkas that I didn’t actually notice them until they started stirring. One of them slowly sat up and stripped off her—no, his—waterlogged coat. The other rolled onto his side with a long groan.

“Well, they’re not going anywhere,” I said, nudging a piece of their boat with my foot. “Unless they like swimming.”

“Bima has room, let’s see where they’re headed.”

I hoped they were friendly, then. They noticed us after a moment and scrambled to their feet. Once they were closer together, I could see similarities in their faces, possibly brothers or cousins, close to our age with the same bright blue eyes.

The one wringing his coat dry was taller and more slender, with thick braids of long brown hair and a face and body so smooth that I couldn’t have been the first person to mistake him for a woman. Three thin bluish lines starting at his shoulders and tapering to points between his knuckles were visible on his arms and the backs of his hands, almost like Air Nomad tattoos. He was smiling a little, at least. Cute. The other one was a bit shorter and built more like an aurochs, wincing as he touched a fresh cut near his left eye. The hair on both sides of his head was shaved down, leaving only a bit on top tied back in a sopping wet wolf tail.

The taller, bare-chested one opened his mouth and said…something, which only made Yun and I cock our heads. It was a rapid blur of hard sounds with barely any pauses, and he looked expectantly at us when he’d finished. At the distance we were standing, without seeing my eyes very well, I supposed I could have passed for Water Tribe. My skin was darker than Yun’s, but not like theirs. He was going to be disappointed if he was waiting for me to say something. “Do you speak any Water Tribe languages?” I asked.

“I know how to ask where the bathroom is in Shuishei…”

All right, we could puzzle it out. I was trying to decide what to pantomime when he spoke again, pointing to the bloodstains on my sleeve as he did. “I’m not hurt,” I said loudly, slowly. “It’s just a small cut.”

“Oh, you speak Chikyan. Sorry, I thought you were from the south, too.”

Well, that made me feel stupid. So they were Southern Water Tribe. The color in Yun’s cheeks was growing as she watched the slow rise and fall of his chest with his breathing. “Are you sure I can’t take care of that for you?” he asked, pointing to my arm again. “Salt water in a cut would really hurt.”

They’d just had their boat destroyed and he was asking after  _my_  well-being? They were definitely hoping for a bison ride, not that I could blame them. “You’re a healer?”

“Best in my tribe,” he said with a slight accent and a lopsided little grin.

“My thanks, then.” I rolled up my sleeve again, and he picked up a water skin from the debris around us. My arm and sleeve were both caked with blood, which he cleared away before popping the cork on his water skin.

“I’m Nanuq, the guy trying to pick up the pieces of our skiff over there is my brother Tiaraq,” he said, laying a handful of water over my outstretched arm. It began glowing, and he carried it over my skin with slow, subtle movements, a far cry from my pieced-together waterbending style.

“Older brother,” Tiaraq said with a heavier accent, sighing as he looked at how completely their boat had splintered. Yun handed him the piece with their heraldry on it, which he accepted with a frown.

“Fine, older brother. Shorter brother, too,” Nanuq added under her breath, flashing me a conspiratorial grin. His tattoos didn’t twist around his arms like an Air Nomad’s, but rather continued straight up to his shoulders in three thin parallel lines. They contorted in odd ways as he moved his hands back and forth, and I noticed his waterbending style placed much more emphasis on the movements of the fingers rather than the wrists, as mine did. Hmm.

“That’s Yun, I’m Kyoshi. Sorry about your boat.”

Both of them paused to look at me, and it suddenly occurred to me how very unique the name I’d chosen was. I supposed it was better to head them off at the pass. “I’m the Avatar.”

“Oh, wow.” He focused a bit more on my arm. “It’s my honor to heal the Avatar, then. So where are you going to?”

“Hitenno,” Yun said, picking up more pieces of the ship. “Somewhere in Hitenno, anyway.”

“The Fire Nation? We’re headed for Shuibei.”

“And this route was  _so much faster_ ,” Tiaraq said, halting after each word and glaring at his brother. He and Yun had most of the ship collected, and they made a pile, perhaps in the vain hope that throwing it all together would put it back in its proper shape.

“It  _is_  faster…it’s also prone to storms.” The sting in my arm was gone, and Nanuq snaked his water back into its container. No scar, too bad. “And as you can see, we don’t really have any way of getting to the Northern Water Tribe now, so…would it be possible for us to hitch a ride on your bison to somewhere we can get another boat? We’d pay you, of course. And we can do the fishing.”

“Oh, you don’t have to pay us,” Yun said, clapping her hand against her thigh to get Bima’s attention. I shot her a frown, which she ignored. We needed stuff! “Bima can take us all to Hitenno. I’m sure we’ll find plenty of ports where you can buy boats.”

They gathered up whatever wasn’t destroyed in the storm, and I helped them into the saddle. Nanuq still hadn’t put his coat back on, but I wasn’t about to complain. Yun settled in on Bima’s neck, cracked the reins, and we lurched forward.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kyoshi, you horndog. And yes, she canonically had [a daughter](http://avatar.wikia.com/wiki/Koko_\(Kyoshi%27s_daughter\)). More chapters in the new year!
> 
> (Nanuq and Tiaraq, art by [willoghby](willoghby.tumblr.com)) 


	13. The Fire Sage

Unlike beef, fish took less getting used to after a year of vegetarianism. It still nearly came back up the first night Nanuq caught us some, but familiar tastes flooded in soon after the first few bites of amberjack. Tiaraq was a good cook, even with the limited supplies we had on hand. Yun even nearly tried a bit from my plate, though she decided to stick with the rice and carrots.

Almost two weeks after leaving the temple, we’d camped out with the last of our firewood on something too small and too rocky to really be called an “island,” it was more of a bare bit of land jutting out of the water near a few other bare bits of land. When I took off my boots to run my feet over the stone, it felt freshly formed, much younger than the other islands we had stopped on while crossing the Silver Sea. Volcanic, so I knew we were headed in the right direction, and Hitenno proper couldn’t be far off. Good news, because I was running out of rice and vegetables for Yun.

“Those are some really interesting tattoos, Nanuq,” Yun said from across the fire. With only his parka left after their boat had wrecked and increasingly warm surroundings, he was bare-chested most of the time. Yun seemed ambivalent to that, but I certainly didn’t mind, and it put the dark lines running up his arms on prominent display. “Almost like an Air Nomad’s.”

He put one arm out so his tattoos caught the firelight better. “Well, I’ve got them on my arms, but I don’t get an arrow on my head. These are guiding lines, for spirits.”

“Spirits?” Yun asked.

“I’m a shaman,” Nanuq said, to which Tiaraq rolled his eyes. “Er…shaman’s apprentice. Assistant, that’s the word. If I was a shaman in my own right, there would be dots around these lines and they would go up to my neck. Ti’s got some tattoos, too.”

Tiaraq hiked up the side of his shirt, displaying an intricate swirling pattern running up toward his chest. Yun nodded and ran her fingers along the back of her hand. “I didn’t realize the Shuinan marked their shamans that way.”

“We’re not Shuinan,” Tiaraq said sharply. He didn’t talk as much as Nanuq—I got the feeling he didn’t have as good a grasp of Chikyan as his brother—but that was loud and clear. “We’re Tayagun.”

_They’re what?_

_Stop interrupting, Korra._

Tayagun, one of the smaller tribes sharing the South Pole with the Shuinan, the dominant group that the Shuibei, the Northern Water Tribe, recognized as their sister clan. Some of the trade reports at the air temple also mentioned Disin and Lonban tribes, but I only really knew anything about the Shuinan. I wasn’t entirely sure of the differences, but apparently they were serious enough to make confusing the groups a contentious matter.

“Our mother is the chief of the Tayagun tribe, actually,” Nanuq said, staying much more even-keel than his brother. Tiaraq fell silent and scowled into the fire.

Well, that made a few more people I’d met in lofty positions. Meanwhile I was the third child of a family too unimportant for a surname and too awful for me to ever speak well of them. Suddenly I felt very out of place. “So I guess you would be the next chief, Tiaraq?” Yun asked, but Nanuq shook his head.

“We have two older sisters, Kara and Seleq are next in line. But then it would fall to us, yes.” He didn’t seem exactly thrilled at the prospect. “Kyoshi, do you know any waterbending?”

It was a bald, abrupt attempt to change the subject, but it seemed to cut the tension well enough. Maybe they were proud of their heritage, maybe it was something more. There was no need to puzzle it out right then. “I taught myself a little. Probably looks like a mess compared to yours.”

“No, I’d like to see it.” He motioned to the rice I was cooking and said something to Tiaraq in Shuishei, at which Tiaraq eased the pot closer to him so he could watch both it and the fish. I followed Nanuq closer to the water, just out of earshot of our camp. The tide was high and lapped at our bare feet. “Whenever you’re ready.”

All right, back to waterbending. I hadn’t used it much in the past two weeks since we’d had experts on hand. I got into the stance I’d made up, shifting my weight to the front of my feet, and flicked my wrists to draw up a thin tendril of water from an incoming wave. My homemade form drew heavily from Yun’s interpretation of southern style airbending, and I could feel the wind on my cheeks while I worked with the water. I flattened it into a disk, raised a few little nubs on the top, formed it into a sphere, and froze the whole thing before tossing it to Nanuq. He nodded, melted the ice, and guided it back into the sea. “So?”

“It’s a little rough,” he said, as diplomatically as he could. My shoulders slumped a little. I knew it wasn’t perfect, but I was trying my best. A vain part of me, the part that kept drawing my gaze to the smooth, lean lines of Nanuq’s bare chest, wanted to impress him. “You can do some interesting things for someone with no training, though. There must still be a lot of Kuruk in you.”

“What’s rough about it?”

He shifted into a wider stance, a mirror of mine. “You’re here, keeping all your power in your hips and feet. I’m guessing it’s how you earthbend. The chi has to have a path to move through your arms and legs, it has to flow easier, like, like…”

“Like water?”

“I guess. You’re too stiff, you’ll have a much easier time if you move like an airbender rather than an earthbender. Here, try it this way,” Nanuq said, straightening up and loosening his arms. I copied his stance, as well as the slow sway of his body as he moved back and forth. It was back to more linear motions, I saw, with some circular elements mixed in. “You want to twist and pivot here more than actually change position. Can I show you?”

“Please.”

Nanuq walked behind me, and I started a little when I felt his hand on my back. It wasn’t quite the same as when Yun corrected something, and he was still a man despite my initial misjudgment, but…I’d desensitized a bit, I supposed. He’d also been nothing but friendly since I met him, so I wasn’t as cagey as I usually was around men I didn’t know well. “Stay rooted at your hips here, but keep turning back and forth, hands nice and level…good. When you turn toward the water, reach out and see what you can do.”

Once he stepped back, I closed my eyes and imagined the swirling contours of energy in the water, visualized them moving the way I wanted, and as I moved my hand back a thick coil of water followed with it. Before it felt like I had been holding it and all its accompanying weight, the same way earthbending felt, but Nanuq’s way…it felt no heavier than a handful of swan feathers. I wasn’t grabbing the water so much as directing it, willing certain paths and shapes, and it followed my thoughts with only the slightest resistance. I opened my eyes and saw it there, arcing around, flouting gravity at nothing more than a few flicks of my wrists.

“Wow…”

“Feels different, right? Now if you add in the movement of your lower body—”

He put his hands on the outsides of my thighs. Too far. The water fell into the sea and my elbow sprang back on reflex, catching him in the side of the head. I didn’t actually want to hit him, but his touch was so sudden—if not entirely unpleasant—that my body moved before my mind could tell it not to.

I wheeled around and grabbed him before he crumpled completely, snapping my fingers in front of his face a few times to get his attention. His bare skin was warm against my hands. “Shit…I’m sorry, I don’t always react well to men touching me.”

All he could do was blink absently for a moment in an attempt to get his eyes to refocus. “Maybe I’ll just demonstrate next time,” he said, slurring his words before he slumped in my arms. I couldn’t leave him like that, so I pulled up another handful of water, rested it at his temple where a nice bruise was starting to form, and tried imitating the motions he’d used to heal my arm when we first met.

It was difficult to keep the motion in my fingers and stop my wrist from moving much. A dim glow lit up the water, not nearly as bright as when he did it. He had brought it in a long line across my cut, but his wound was focused in a smaller area. I tried little circles instead, guiding the water with my first two fingers. All of my lessons in waterbending seemed to be crash courses, one way or another.

“Oh, my head,” he said through a groan. Complaints or not, he was talking, and that had to be better than having him lay unconscious. “You’ve got some elbow.”

“So I’ve been told. Am I doing this right? I don’t want to scramble your brains or anything.”

He couldn’t exactly see what I was doing, so he paused for a moment to let the feeling sink in, and then he smiled. “No scrambled brains here, you’re doing fine,” Nanuq said, relaxing against me. “You know, you’re kind of cute when you’re worried.”

I dropped him.

I didn’t  _mean_  to drop him, or lose my grip on the water only to have it splash on his face, but hearing those kinds of things was still something of a novelty. I was making a wonderful impression…I sat him up and quite accidentally let my hand fall on his chest. Still warm. “We should probably stop before you get smacked around anymore.”

“Good idea.”

The smile he gave me was still a little dazed and disoriented, but undeniably sweet. I was such a sap.

_Wait, what happened to Yun?_

_Nothing, Korra. She’s still there. Try and keep up._

⁂

None of us were entirely sure which Fire Nation town we were quickly approaching, because we couldn’t agree about which island we were coming up on. Yun thought it was Baihe Island, while Nanuq and Tiaraq were confident that it was Orchard Island. I didn’t really see how it mattered either way. With three languages between us—well, between them—surely we wouldn’t have a problem finding a temple and getting Nanuq and Tiaraq back on course to the Northern Water Tribe. If worst came to worst and we couldn’t find anyone who spoke something other than Hitennese, I could always start bending more than one element. Someone would have to grasp that kind of display.

Bima came in low, skittering over the surface of the water before landing hard in an empty storage area near the docks. Besides some slightly different roof and door designs and a preponderance of red and gold, it seemed much like Kaiko, a small port in a state of mild disrepair. Nanuq, Tiaraq and I rolled out of the saddle, happy to be back on solid ground, while Yun was content to linger on Bima’s neck a little longer before hopping down.

A massive flying bison tended to attract attention almost anywhere outside of Tochi lands, and the little Fire Nation port was no exception. Some children playing by the water rushed over to marvel at Bima, so Yun stayed behind to watch over her and hand out some of our remaining food for them to offer the bison. I frowned when I saw her giving out the last few stalks of asparagus. I wanted those. “I’ll see who knows about a temple,” I said to the boys. That wasn’t right, they both had a few years on me, but they were so much shorter than me that it was difficult not to think of them as younger, too. “You can handle finding your own transport?”

“Just a second.” Nanuq turned to his brother and rattled off something in Shuishei I couldn’t hope to understand, which felt like a deliberate attempt to keep me out of their conversation. I didn’t like that. Nonetheless, I stayed silent, shrinking back while they traded hard, sharp sounds and gesticulated wildly. Their arms flew as freely as their words, and it might have been funny if I hadn’t felt so left out.

As if sensing my discomfort, they switched back to Chikyan so I could catch the last bit. “Someone here has to be trading work for passage,” Tiaraq said, stumbling over his words a little. My language definitely wasn’t one of his strengths, but somehow that only made me appreciate the gesture more. Nanuq nodded.

“You’ll find a crew, I’m sure of it.”

_You’ll_? Not  _we’ll_?

“Not buying another boat?” I asked.

“Most of our money is at the bottom of the Silver Sea,” Nanuq said. Then how were they planning to pay  _us_? “It’s not easy to get people to take a promise of payment when almost no one knows your tribe. But at least one of these ships has to be heading north, and crews are always looking for waterbenders.”

“That they are. Well, it was nice meeting both of you, best of luck. I hope the rest of your journey is less exciting.”

I gave them a small nod, but Tiaraq grabbed Nanuq’s parka and pushed him toward me before I could walk away. “Ah, all right, all right! Avatar Kyoshi—”

“Just ‘Kyoshi’, please.”

“Right, Kyoshi. We talked about it, and only one of us really needs to go to Shuibei for what we’re trying to do,” Nanuq said, shifting his weight from foot to foot. “It would mean more coming from Tiaraq, since he’s older than me.”

“And?”

“And so we thought if you hadn’t committed yourself to a waterbending teacher yet, well…I’m available.”

It was true, I hadn’t found a waterbending teacher. I had planned on going to the Northern Water Tribe after Hitenno to look for one. But if firebending took as much time as airbending to at least gain a workmanlike competence, then it would probably be at least a year. Splitting time between waterbending and firebending training without travel interrupting me might be more efficient, and learning two opposite elements at once could be interesting. Unconventional, surely. But then, the Avatar was allowed to be a bit unconventional.

“I thought you had important shaman’s apprentice duties,” I said dryly, teasing him a little.

Nanuq laughed nervously and rubbed the back of his neck. Tiaraq rolled his eyes. “It’s possible I may have overstated my significance there…our older sister Seleq is the actual shaman, and she has other assistants besides me. But you won’t find a better healer anywhere outside of the tribes, and I’m sure she would understand if I took a leave of absence to train the Avatar.”

Maybe I would stop short of calling our meeting providence, I didn’t believe in such things. It was more like a stroke of sheer luck for them as a result of their questionable navigational decisions. Still, one little lesson from him improved my waterbending immensely, it wouldn’t be a terrible thing to learn healing with how often I got knocked around, and…ugh, he was cute. My head was nodding before I could speak.

“All right, then. Let’s go find a temple. Safe travels, Tiaraq.”

He clasped my hand with a solemn nod, then threw his arms tightly around Nanuq. They exchanged something in Shuishei, maybe a farewell, and then let their foreheads rest against one another while trading successively harder blows to the arms, laughing the whole time. Men were strange. Eventually they separated and Tiaraq went off to find a ship going north. Nanuq’s expression dropped slightly. “That’s that, I guess.”

“That’s that. Listen, Nanuq,” I said, starting toward another pier with what looked like a Chikyan-speaking crew near one of the ships. “About last night. If you’re going to teach me proper waterbending, you can’t go around calling me cute. Student and teacher, all right?”

“You’re the Avatar, your rules.” He cleared some water from the docks and returned it to the bay as he followed behind me. “I’m still going to think it, though.”

I paused, and he had to step to the side to keep from walking into me. Without my face paint, the color in my cheeks was plainly visible. “Yes, well…I suppose I can’t stop you from thinking things.” Not that I particularly wanted to, but he didn’t need to know that. Yet.

_No, hold on, what happened to Yun?_

_Korra, you need to stop interrupting._

“Excuse me.”

A sailor shooting dice against a crate stood and gawked when he saw me. “Whoa, save some height for the rest of us, won’t you?”

Yeah, I’d never heard that one before. “Do you know of any temples around here?” I asked. “Somewhere we could find Fire Sages?”

He consulted with his friends in a blend of Chikyan and what I assumed was Hitennese. Sailors I didn’t have to beat up, what a novel concept. “There’s Shudan Temple up on the hill there,” he said, pointing vaguely north. “Big tower, hard to miss. Might be some sages there.”

Nanuq gave them a small bow. “Thank you. Do you know what island we’re on, by any chance?”

“This is Baihe, son.”

“Oh.” His shoulders slumped a bit. “Well, the temple is the important thing…thanks, then.”

Yun was still with Bima, tossing some of the children up into the saddle with her airbending. I dipped down to wrap my arms around her waist and planted a light kiss on her neck. “ _Ah_ …hello there,” she says, whimpering as I gently suckled at her skin to leave a little bruise. “Kyoshi!”

“Should I stop?” I asked, letting her melt into my grip.

Nanuq decided to focus intently on a cloud overhead while he tugged at his collar. I’d never felt quite so hypocritical, setting one teacher at arm’s length while claiming another, but Yun started laughing when I tickled her, so I didn’t much care. “Later,” she whispered when she was through giggling. “The children!”

“Fine, fine.” I let her go, but not before nibbling at her ear. “We can’t take them with us, though. Their parents might not like it.”

None of us spoke Hitennese, so there was a good deal of pantomiming involved in getting the children down from the saddle. “So, do we know where we’re going?” Yun asked, fixing her robes after my assault. “And is Nanuq coming with us?”

“I need waterbending training, too. Shudan Temple, north of town. Here on Baihe Island,” I added, glancing over at Nanuq.

“Yeah, yeah…”

He kept looking between me and Yun before shrugging and chuckling a bit to himself. It wasn’t a big town we’d found, maybe half again the size of Kaiko, and soon enough we’d cleared the limits only to find ourselves above lush forests with winding paths cut through them. Where I lived in Chikyu wasn’t rich in trees, and the lands around the Southern Air Temple were similarly desolate. There was a great deal more green than I was used to seeing, and it was beautiful. I busied myself with my face paint, hoping to make a good, formal impression on the Fire Sages.

“Is this the place?” Yun asked over the wind, pointing to a low, cresting hill rising over the trees. A massive, five-tiered pagoda enameled in white gold thrusted up from the ground there, gleaming in the midday sun. My stomach turned. “It’s certainly…opulent.”

“It’s disgusting,” I said. “There were buildings on the docks that were ready to fall down. The upkeep costs from this place could feed a city like that for a year.”

“How do you know?” Nanuq asked.

“I used to put up buildings where I lived. All those roofs need support, and there’s nothing buttressing them out here, so it has to be on the inside. Much more expensive to maintain. All the stuff on the walls is getting replaced regularly, otherwise it would wear away from the wind and rain. Not to mention the cost of transporting supplies through a forest on small carts. It’s a lot of money to spend on a building with no practical purpose. It’s all for show.”

_You really knew a lot about buildings._

_Not all of my days were spent in fighting pits, Korra. My father, not that he even deserves to be called such, was a builder and liked to talk about it when he was sober._

“Maybe that  _is_  its purpose,” Yun said. “It’s a temple, it’s supposed to belong to everyone.”

“Right. Everyone.” I would have suggested going to another temple, but I doubted we could find one with less ostentation. “Let’s see if there’s anyone here who speaks Chikyan.”

Bima circled the temple a few times as she descended, drawing closer with each pass and bringing more detail of the building into view. The enamel on the walls had a texture that looked like rising flames, and the edges of the roofs had more white gold on them. It was all well-maintained, I saw.

The forest immediately around the temple had been cut clear, and in its place stood several fields marked by scorches and low dividing walls. Well, there were firebenders there, so it was as good a place as any to start looking. Bima rolled onto her side as soon as we dismounted, and Yun and Nanuq followed as I went inside.

“Interesting lighting scheme,” Nanuq said when we walked into the low, octagonal entry hall. Torches hanging from the walls and ceiling burned dimly, and the various statues in the room casted garish shadows along the tilework floor. It was also quite empty. “Hello? Is anyone here?”

Possibly the only thing worse than a gaudy temple was an abandoned gaudy temple. Someone had to be there, the torches didn’t light themselves. We could either try the staircase at the far end of the room, or any of the several doors recessed into the walls around us. The one to our left looked promising, with a bar of light peeking out from the gap between the door and the ground.

And as soon as I figured out how to open the door, we could continue. “Is there a knob or a handle somewhere…?”

Nanuq reached past me and pushed on it, letting the door swing forward with minimal resistance.

“Oh. Thank you.”

Inside was what looked to be a small bath, lined in a brighter wood than the red-stained mahogany of the entry hall. Steam plumed up from a long tub of water, in front of which sat a man—no, a woman, I was so bad at figuring out those things at a glance—stripped to the waist with nothing but a crimson towel around her hips. She had tattoos along her back at her chakra points, but what I noticed first were the burns. Large sections of her skin were unnaturally smooth and reddened, healed over but still obviously touched by fire. Her head turned slowly, until a pair of bright, impassive amber eyes gazed at us from across the room.

She stood up, and her towel was apparently very loose, because it fell away almost immediately, leaving her naked and putting more of the burns on her legs on display. One long section of scar tissue snaked from the side of her ribcage all the way down to her right knee, but she didn’t give any indication of being in pain. She didn’t give any indication of anything, as a matter of fact. The most animated thing about her was the braid of thick black hair bobbing around on her shoulder as she turned to face us. Yes, definitely a woman, very beautiful, probably around my age if not slightly older. Yun’s face was all kinds of red and Nanuq was looking pointedly away, but there wasn’t a shred of embarrassment, or anything else, in her expression.

“Avatar Kyoshi,” she said with a slight rasp to her voice. It sounded like her lungs were burned, too.

“You know who I am?”

“Unless you happen to be another tall, androgynous woman with a penchant for face paint.”

It would sound like a joke had her voice not been so flat. There were some red robes hanging on a hook near her, but she wasn’t making any motion toward them. “No, that’s me. Are you one of the Fire Sages?”

“Yes. My name is Takarabe Rei. Have you come for your firebending training?”

“That’s why I’m here…I’m sorry, are we interrupting something?” I asked. “Because we can wait in the entry hall.”

“No, you are not interrupting.”

I looked back at Yun and Nanuq. They were both the most brilliant shade of red by that point, and I was sure I wasn’t much better under my face paint. “All right, then.”

Rei finally went to dress herself, and her robes turned out to cover everything but her hands and head. “How many rooms do you need?” she asked, wincing as she adjusted a part of one sleeve that rested over a burn.

“Two—no, three. Three is fine.”

“Very well. The staff in the kitchens will make you whatever you want. All of the rooms on the third floor are empty, distribute them amongst yourselves as you see fit. Excuse me.”

She brushed past us and disappeared up the staircase, and despite the warmth in the air I felt a chill run down my spine. Her voice was so flat and just…deadened, not to mention her utter lack of reaction to us. Maybe she wasn’t easily impressed? Whatever the reason, I got the impression that it would be an altogether different kind of experience than airbending training.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Rei, art by [AATKAW](aatkaw.tumblr.com)) 


	14. The Spirit of Competition

“Hey, this is pretty nice.”

Nanuq strolled into one of the empty rooms on the third floor and ran his hand along the side of a lacquered wood wardrobe. It really was nice, maybe bordering on opulent, I noticed as we peered inside. Very red, but still nice. Thick rugs covered the floor, and the pillows and bed sheets were a rich crimson silk. “How about I take this one?”

“Fine with me,” I said, and we left him to his own devices. Yun’s face was still the same color as the décor, at least from what I could see of it. She was staring hard at the ground, holding weakly at a fold of my kimono and following without resistance. It reminded me of how out of her element she was. How far removed from the familiar we both were.

Another pair of doors right next to one another were further down the hall, and I gave one a little push. It swung aside easily—locks weren’t a big thing in Hitenno, apparently—to reveal a room much like the one Nanuq had claimed, the key difference being a slightly larger bed. That would do. I put our things down and ruffled Yun’s hair, flipping a few locks between my fingers. “Everything all right?”

“This place is nearly empty,” she said, keeping her head hung as if she’d been shouted into submission. “Apart from that girl.”

She looked like as much of a woman as either of us, but the point stood. The only sounds had been our footsteps and the burning of torches, and it was a bit odd. Even a rundown little place like Seizhon had a more active temple at midday than that. We were able to walk right in and there was a path back to town, so it wasn’t cloistered or closed off. It made my hackles rise a little. “All right, let’s see what else we can find. Who else, rather.”

Rei had mentioned servants, but they seemed to be very good at staying out of sight. I had explored a good stretch of the Southern Air Temple in the days after arriving, I figured I’d do the same for the Shudan Temple. Yun kept her grip on my side as we went back to the staircase. The second floor only had alcoves filled with statues and spots for incense instead of doors, so we continued upward, to the fourth floor. Rows and rows of shelves dominated the entire space, filled with tightly curled scrolls in varying states of dustiness.

“This might also be the library for the town we passed through,” Yun said as she followed me to a stand with a single scroll laid flat on it. The torches there were covered with spheres of clear glass, probably to keep errant sparks from starting a fire with all the wood and paper around, but they still provided enough diffuse light to read. Both of us looked at the scroll, and while the characters were familiar, the way they were arranged made no sense to me, forming words that I couldn’t pronounce. Yun tapped on the scroll. “Hitennese script.”

Well, they would hardly have Chikyan or Tochi scrolls, I supposed. There was some rustling nearby, and we wandered through the shelves to find the source. For a country built around fire, their lighting left something to be desired, and shadows covered most of the space. Maybe they expected people to provide their own light? Scrolls were piled up on the floor as well as the shelves, making it a precarious matter to follow the noise without knocking anything over.

I could feel Yun’s grip on my kimono tighten when we rounded the last shelf and found Rei at a desk, surrounded by more scrolls, each stack higher than the last. Her quill scratched across some parchment under the low, flickering light of another shrouded sconce until she straightened up, as if sensing our presence behind her. Well, that, or she’d heard us clomping around on the creaky wooden floors.

She glanced back at us, twisting the sound chakra tattoo on her neck. “Did you need something?” she asked in the same flat tone as before, with only the barest inflection. “The servants will get you whatever you would like in town if you make them a list. Their Chikyan is spotty, but please be patient with them.”

“Actually, we were curious about where everyone else was,” I said. “Unless you’re the only Fire Sage assigned to this temple.”

“The others are at a conclave in the capital to elect the new High Sage. They should return from Kasai within a month, this letter will let them know of your arrival beforehand.”

Rei turned back to her parchment and continued writing. Not one for conversation, apparently. “So, there are women Fire Sages?” Yun asked, perhaps feeling more talkative since Rei had some clothes on.

“Yes.”

“How many?”

“One,” she said, never looking back at us. “Firebending training will start an hour past dawn tomorrow, please be ready.”

Satisfied with her letter, she blew on it to dry the ink and then folded it up. She melted some wax in her hand, dripped it onto the letter, and finally pressed a seal into it before getting up and leaving without another word.

“Maybe the other sages will have a little more…personality,” I said.

“Or a personality at all.”

There wasn’t much more to the temple that seemed worth exploring. If there was an area for servants, it was likely below ground, and I didn’t want to disturb them. The next floor up consisted of five especially ascetic bedchambers, little more than tiny cells with tatami mats on the floor beneath slit windows. Above that was the smallest floor yet, seemingly built into the topmost pagoda, which housed the temple’s sanctum and a small hawkery where Rei was fixing her letter to the leg of a beautiful, sleek black raptor. She explained that the sanctum door took five firebenders or an Avatar with a, as she put it, _workmanlike competence_ in firebending to open. Neither were handy, so I tried not to worry about it too much.

“Do you have any requests for dinner?” Rei asked, watching her hawk soar west. “Kiku still has time to go to the market if we lack anything.”

Sounds like they really knew how to treat an Avatar. “Rice, vegetables, fish, chicken? If they know how to make sesame cakes, I’d like some of those, too,” I said.

Rei nodded “I will let her know once I feed the hawks.”

Throwing raw meat to several large birds in a small, enclosed space seemed like it would be a messy affair, so we made a quick exit before the chaos began. I could hear frantic squawking as soon as Yun closed the door. She seemed to be in better spirits, at least. “Hopefully Nanuq didn’t get himself into any trouble,” she said.

There was snoring coming from his room when we returned to our floor. Hard to get in trouble that way. “A nap doesn’t sound too bad, really.”

⁂

“Do you want me to come with you?”

Yun rolled across the bed toward me, pressing up to my side. The lamp on my nightstand was finally burning down, and the first bars of sunlight were peeking through the window. Fire Nation mornings were warm and humid, filled with the sounds of singing birds and chirping crickets. There was a certain serenity to it all, a far cry from Earth Kingdom farmers rising at dawn to tend to their flocks or Air Nomads reciting sutras. I could get used to it, waking up a little later. Waking up with Yun curled against me like her life depended on it.

“Do you  _want_  to come with me?” I asked.

Her response was immediate, and came with an expectant shift of her body. “Yes! I can’t read the scrolls here, so there isn’t much else for me to do. Besides, someone needs to be able to save you from that girl. And…I’ve never seen real firebending before.”

“I lit the lamp, didn’t I?”

“You know what I mean.” All right, so she wanted to see more than a few sparks get thrown around. I had to admit, I was curious too. “You shouldn’t have to be alone with her, either.”

“Are you jealous?” I asked, teasing as I wrapped my arms around her. “Because I’ve seen you naked, too. I’m seeing it right now, and I like it, a lot.”

Her fingers traced up and down my stomach, skirting near the swells of my breasts. “No, it’s not that…”

“What, you saw me first?”

“No! I mean, I did, but—that’s not the point,” Yun said, propping herself up on her elbow. She chewed her lip for a moment, thinking about how to continue. “I guess I’m not used to the idea of someone else monopolizing your time. I’ve had you all to myself for a year.”

“Don’t be greedy, now,” I said, pulling her down into a long, slow kiss. She melted in my arms, falling flush against my chest with a sharp intake of breath. We’d fallen asleep almost immediately after dinner, but she was still on the hook. “I belong to the whole world, after— _ahh_ …”

Yun lurched away in case she’d hurt me, but it was nothing so simple. I must have looked a sight, doubling up, legs pressing defensively to my body. Someone had run me through with a knife, that had to be it. The most powerful person in the world, and still at the mercy of her body. “Kyoshi?”

“Cramps, just cramps.”  _Bad_  cramps. I clutched harder at my stomach. “It’ll pass, it always does.”

She didn’t look very convinced, but I managed to unknot myself after a moment and trudge over to the wardrobe. I just had to work through it and think about something else like I usually did. My kimono was getting a badly-needed wash, and wearing my Air Nomad robes might have sent the wrong message. There was a large selection of Fire Nation styles in the drawers, even though most of what would fit me was menswear. One outfit stuck out to me, a sleeveless vest split in the front to the waist in scarlet silk and trimmed in gold, with matching pants of a slightly heavier fabric that ended right below the knee. Combined with a few accessories in another drawer, it wasn’t a bad training outfit. I picked it all up and grabbed some fresh wraps.

I didn’t have any nightclothes to take off, but getting dressed was still an ordeal, every twist and turn of my torso bringing with it a new, aching pang of soreness. It was rarely so bad. Stress from unfamiliar surroundings, maybe. Whatever reason my body had decided to fall on a sword for, it had certainly picked a fine time to do it.

The door swung open as I was tying up a wrist guard, and Rei was there, impassive as ever, dressed in looser robes than the day before that showed her arms and the burns on her skin. Yun yelped and pulled the bed sheets up to cover herself, even though our host seemed like she couldn’t have cared less. “I’m late, I know,” I said before she could reprimand me, hunching over as I spoke. “Give me a minute.”

“Are you hurt?”

“You know, same as every other month.”

Rei nodded after a few moments and stepped inside, pointing to the bed as she did. “Lie down.”

Bed rest? I figured I could manage that. I might have been too lazy for my own good. I slipped a little on the sheets as I fell back into a sitting position, and then I eased down to lie on my back. Rei hiked up the bottom of my vest and tugged my pants down slightly, although not without resistance. I tried to squirm away, but she put me back in place without a word or flash of annoyance. Strong. “Hey, what are you doing?” Yun asked, still holding up the bed sheets over her chest with one hand.

Rei pressed her hands to me and exhaled sharply. Her palms heated up immediately and pushed more firmly on my abdomen, calming the stabbing sensation I tried to take in stride most months. She took a deep breath as her hands moved in large circles, and I propped up on my elbows to watch. Yun seemed interested too, her curiosity overpowering her indignation at the sight of someone else touching me. Oh…she was touching me. The cramps had distracted me at first, but after that I was all too aware of her hands on my skin, fingers brushing at the top of the little patch of hair between my legs. I went to push her hands away, but she drew them back herself before I could with a final pulse of heat.

“Better?” she asked, rasping slightly.

How she managed to impart concern with a flat voice was beyond me. I fixed my clothes and sure enough, the knife in my belly was more like an annoying, manageable soreness. All right, I knew what the first firebending technique I wanted to learn was. “Much better, thanks…where’d you learn that? And can you teach it to me?”

Something resembling a smile flashed at the corners of her mouth. “I developed it myself to dull my own menses. When you have a better understanding of firebending, I can teach it to you. Shall we begin now?”

“Go ahead, we’ll be right down.”

Rei finally acknowledged my bedmate with a vacant glance in her direction before slipping out of the room. We both shivered despite the warmth. “Creepy,” Yun said, throwing off the sheets to go rifle through my wardrobe for clothes. “Creepy, creepy girl.”

I gave my stomach a few curious taps. The pain didn’t seem to be returning. “Hard to argue with her results, though.”

“I thought you didn’t like being touched,” she said, her voice remaining restrainedly even.

“Well, I hooked Nanuq in the side of the head the other night when he tapped my thigh, if it makes you feel any better.”

My attempt to lighten the mood fell flat, and I sat silently at the foot of my bed rather than dig myself deeper. Yun cocked an eyebrow at what looked like little more than a red bandeau, not that it stopped her from slipping it on along with an open-sided vest and a long, flowing skirt, both in a yellow slightly brighter than her usual robes, which had also gone to the laundry. It was nice to see her showing a little skin. “All right, let’s go.”

She still seemed a little cold. I picked her up around the waist the way she liked and set her on the wardrobe, which put us at almost the same height, and cupped her cheeks in my hands. Yun moaned a little when I leaned in without quite kissing her, brushing my lips over hers and denying her the opportunity to close the gap. Her breath was so warm and ragged. “I’m breaking in that bed later with  _you_ , not Rei. You. Understand?”

I got a breathless nod in response and finally planted a hard kiss on her, the kind that bruised lips and never lasted long enough. Her legs started wrapping around me, and I was tempted, very tempted, but we were already late. Yun pouted when I eased away and put her back on the floor. “Later.”

“I’ll hold you to that.”

The pin and little flame-shaped pieces of gold on the wardrobe looked to be for a topknot, but I stuck with working my hair into a simple braid before we went down to the antechamber. Some servants shuffled past us on the stairs with deep bows, and seemed a little surprised, but grateful, when we bade them a good morning. Nanuq was in the entry hall with Rei, tearing through what looked like a leg of capon. He finally had something to wear other than his parka, a black and red vest with dark pants rolled up to his knees. I was glad to see at least one of us had figured out the topknot, though I wondered why Fire Nation fashion seemed to have such a problem with sleeves.

“Morning,” he said, muffled somewhat by his breakfast. “I think this chicken is even better than it was last night!”

Yun gave him a grimace. She never chastised us for eating meat, but neither did she ever seem particularly approving or even ambivalent. My stomach growled. “Are you ready to begin?” Rei asked.

Firebending was how I had discovered I was the Avatar, and ever since I’d come to terms with it, I’d been interested in getting better than calling up a few piddling bits of fire in the palm of my hand. I had never seen much firebending, but there had been illustrated scrolls at the Southern Air Temple about Hogosha, the Fire Nation Avatar before Yangchen, and the way he could call up massive walls of flame. “Let’s do this.”

“Sit.”

Rei took up a lotus position opposite me, right there in the entry hall, oblivious to all of us looking askance at her. “What?”

“Sit down,” she repeated. “Use whatever position is most comfortable for you, straighten your back, and close your eyes. Nanuq, Yun, if you would like to join us, please do the same.”

Oh no, not more meditation. I had already stumbled my way through airbending while being a terrible meditator, I hadn’t been looking forward to doing more. The only reason I’d gotten out of it was because of Yun’s crush on me, and I doubted that the same thing would work on Rei. “I know how to meditate, I’ve learned this already.”

“Then you should have no problem doing it again. Now sit.”

Yun and Nanuq both dropped, her in a lotus position, him cross-legged. And I thought I was the disciplinarian. I followed suit with them, crossing my legs and doing as Rei said, working the nighttime kinks out of my spine and shutting my eyes. There were servants nearby, plainly audible despite the wide berth they were giving us. “Should we be doing this here?” I asked. “It doesn’t seem like the quietest spot.”

“Firebending requires inner balance, an unassailable peace,” Rei said. “For that, you must learn to shut out distractions. Focus on my voice for now. Imagine the fire in your belly, the sea of chi at your third chakra. Watch your rising breath stoke the flames, watch them dim to embers as you exhale. This fire is all that you are, all your energy and strength of will. Keep it alive, and it will keep you alive. Now hold the image in your mind for as long as you can. Count your breaths. Draw in for eight seconds, hold for five, and exhale for six.”

Her voice was rasping badly and cutting out in places by the time she finished her instructions. Her lungs were surely burned, too. She didn’t offer any more guidance, and Yun and Nanuq didn’t say anything, so I supposed I had to do it.

I could see the flame after a few moments, a tiny thing burning above an expanse of bright, swirling chi. Every time I took a breath it plumed up, licking comfortably at my insides as I held it, and then it fell when I exhaled. For a few minutes I managed to keep it clear in my mind, and then—

The floor was hard. I was hungry. There was a fly buzzing somewhere in the room. Yun and I were going to destroy that nice big bed later.

And then I lost the image, handily snuffing out my fire chakra along the way. Maybe I was still stuck trying to satisfy the one below it. I groaned and opened my eyes to see Nanuq staring up at the ceiling, leaning back on his hands for support. Yun and Rei were still sitting in silence, breathing with the same rhythm. Come on, Kyoshi. If a nun and a sage could do it, the Avatar could, too. I straightened up my back, put my hands in my lap, and tried again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm guessing you all aren't big Evangelion fans, because I've yet to hear any jokes about Rei.
> 
> Anyway, getting a nice look at pre-War firebending philosophy here. And for those of you who like to try and translate things, Fire Nation-ese (Hitennese) is primarily Japanese with a little Sanskrit rather than the Mandarin I use for Air Nation-ese (Tochi) and Earth Kingdom-ese (Chikyan).


	15. Dangerous Games

I might have overextended myself when I decided to learn firebending and waterbending at the same time. Every morning was another fruitless hour of meditation with Rei, which only seemed to wear me down, and then simple, mindless drills until lunch. There was a surprising amount of footwork involved, much more so than the style of airbending I learned. With my size and height, it wasn’t easy to shift my weight fast enough to swing into the kicks the way Rei demonstrated. The jabs and hooks were easier, and after every few sessions I could feel my flames growing brighter and hotter.

Even heavy earthbending wasn’t as draining, though. By the time Rei was done with me, I could barely choke down some lunch before dragging Yun back to my room for a nap. Even those didn’t help much, plagued as they were by familiar and yet unfamiliar dreams of a Water Tribe man fighting shadows. A vague desire to learn enough Hitennese to get by in the Fire Nation was constantly buried under several layers of fatigue, along with a distracting soreness in my hips and legs from all the kicks and footwork.

If that had been all, I might have been able to manage. But true to his word, Nanuq dutifully rapped on my door every day a half-hour before sunset for my waterbending training. He tried strolling right in on the first day, but a blast of air from Yun and a door to the face dissuaded him from trying that again.

The promise of the day’s nap was all that was keeping me going through Rei’s drills. I’d already lost my breakfast, and I didn’t think I could keep any lunch down. Step forward, rotate my arm one quarter-turn, jab on the exhale. A stream of fire brightened the cloudy day. Step, rotate, jab. Step, rotate, jab. Rei watched with her usual unreadable expression from a rock she’d had me place at the edge of our practice area. At least airbending training was fun, even if my progress had been laughable for a good while. Yun and I would talk and laugh and joke, but Rei…whatever gave her those scorch marks seemed to have burned out her personality, too. I finished my drill and turned to her while I caught my breath.

She pushed a lock of hair behind her ear and met my gaze with her sharp amber eyes. “Again.”

“It’s been five hours, I’m exhausted.” Not to mention bored to tears. In three weeks I had yet to move on from the basic forms. Even going back to meditating started to seem appealing.

“Do you intend to fight every battle fresh and well-rested? Again.”

“Rei, I don’t have anything left!”

For a moment I dared to think I had convinced her, dared to think she might allow me to slink off early with a scrap of energy for once. What a foolish notion. Rei uncrossed her legs and hopped down from her rock before thrusting one arm out at her side, keeping eye contact with me all the while. Flames so hot they burned white leapt from her hand, lighting up the late morning as if she’d pulled the sun a bit closer. Sweat beaded up and rolled down my skin in a matter of seconds, soaking through my training clothes. There wasn’t an inkling of expression from Rei, as usual.

It was a solid minute before she closed her fist and snuffed the fire. I wiped my brow dry. “That is what a scarred peasant with no particular aptitude can do. You are the Avatar, and you have plenty left. Your fire chakra is blocked and you are burning through your chi too quickly. Sit down.”

“Please, not more meditating, I can’t stand meditating.”

_Now I see why she’s your favorite Avatar._

_Natural earthbenders rarely possess the level of detachment meditation requires. Ask your brother._

Her mouth twinged in what was likely annoyance. “Come with me, then.”

We returned to the temple, passing by Bima who was lazing around in one of the fields. She tensed up and growled at Rei, who paid the bison no mind, and then rolled over again when we headed in. Some people from the port at the south end of the island—Shinden village, which Rei claimed as her hometown—were inside, lighting incense or laying small offerings at the feet of the statues ringing the antechamber, but they didn’t waylay us. In Fire Nation clothes, without my face paint, I was little more than an especially tall woman. That was fine with me. Yun and Nanuq were coming down the stairs as we entered, also blending in with their Fire Nation reds and golds.

“But what do people  _do_  at the air temples?” Nanuq asked, to which Yun shrugged.

“Study, train bison, teach classes. Some go down into the valleys to help the laypeople tend the fields.”

“Charmed life…oh, there they are. Done already?”

Rei pushed open a door to a room I hadn’t seen yet and pulled me inside before I could answer him. Much like the salt bath we met her in, it was a dimly-lit, wood-paneled room with a pool of water in the center, but this one looked shallower, and it was set into the stone floor. A reflecting pool, maybe. Yun and Nanuq poked their heads inside and made their way over to me while Rei nodded to the closer end of the pool. “Sit.”

So it _was_ more meditating, wonderful. She went around to the far side of the room where an altar with two dragons, one white and one black, were swirling around one another in a rising spiral. After a deep bow and a few unintelligible words at the altar, she planted herself at the far edge of the pool, dipping one finger in the water so that ripples echoed over the surface toward me.

“What is this?”

“A lesson, since you either have no willingness, or ability, to meditate through this block,” Rei said, keeping her eyes on the water. “The Air Nomads were careless, because your training is sorely lacking in that regard.”

Yun bristled, and I put a hand on her shoulder.

“Perhaps understanding your purpose will provide better motivation for you to learn. Do you know what you are the Avatar  _of_? Do you know anything of the origin of the world?”

“No, and no,” I said. “I’m just a scarred peasant, too.”

“They taught you nothing…? You should have come here first.”

“I’m a perfectly good teacher,” Yun snapped, her hands balling into fists. “Better than you. Kyoshi actually learned from me, all you have her do is repeat the same drills over and over.”

Rei didn’t rise to her taunt, which only made Yun angrier. I pulled her a little closer. “You two are here as a courtesy. Do not make me withdraw it.”

“What’d I do?” Nanuq asked.

Her gaze lingered on him for a long moment, drifting up and down. It was the same way I looked at him whenever he shrugged out of his vest near the end of our training sessions, grumbling about the heat. Rei took a long breath and straightened up.

“Long ago, all was ether, formlessness without end or beginning. After timeless time, perhaps uncounted centuries, perhaps a few blinks of an eye, this void gave rise to a great spirit, which occupied everything with itself. It knew no universe outside of itself, for it spread along the length and breadth of existence. This spirit was Samagrata,  _totality_ , and within it resided all the energy of the nascent world. ‘It is me!’ cried Samagrata, and in doing so brought into the world  _I_ , and  _self_.

“With  _self_  came fear, and loneliness. For what can exist in solitude? There then came separation, and Samagrata was no more, and from it sprang the primal dragons Raani and Vaani, and with them came  _you_ , and  _other_. In the instant before they fell into their dancing embrace, the dragons, the one-that-became-two, let spring into being  _absence_ , and in the gulf between them the world took shape.

“These dragons roamed over the unformed world with abandon, eons passing as beats of the heart. From their power rose the One-Tree, the great anchor of time and space in the universe, another one-that-became-two, split along its trunk with one half white and one half black. Raani and Vaani lived long within the One-Tree’s hollow before emerging, when they saw their One-Tree had borne them two pieces of fruit, one from its white half and one from its black half. And these were the fruit of wisdom, and the fruit of life.

“Believing them identical, Raani ate of the fruit of wisdom and became Raava, the great dragon of light, order, and stillness. Vaani ate of the fruit of life and became Vaatu, the great dragon of shadow, chaos, and change. They looked and admired the new forms they took, light and shadow made solid.

“From Vaatu came air and fire, freedom and power, and the divine spark of will. From Raava came water and earth, peace and structure, and the divine spark of consciousness. They combined these elements in varying proportions and gave rise to the ten thousand things, all the plants and animals, all the seas and mountains of the world. So too did they create the sun and the moon, and all the heavenly bodies locked in their eternal dance.

“In all things lie the traces of Raava and Vaatu. From them came four lion turtles the size of islands, each in perfect harmony with one element. To the north rose the lion turtle of water and its scores of hydra servants, while to the south rose the lion turtle of air and its great bison servants. To the west rose the lion turtle of fire and its servants, the lesser dragons, and to the east rose the lion turtle of earth with its badgermole servants. And to them was given power over the elements that they might help in shaping the early world.

“‘Shall we,’ said Vaatu, ‘create a being of perfect confluence, with the sparks of both will and consciousness?’

“Raava so agreed, and the great dragons combined the elements in equal measure within a single being. Earth formed its body, water its blood, fire its life, and air its strength. When it was done, and to it they had imparted the sparks of will and consciousness, they gave it a name,  _human_. Raava and Vaatu entrusted the humans to the care of the lion turtles, and stood back to enjoy all they had created.

“But with  _you_  and  _other_ came  _discord_. Whenever humans disagreed and fought and died, their destruction brought strength to Vaatu and weakened the order Raava established. For Raava is the perfect stillness of a tranquil pond, and Vaatu is the ripples on its surface from a falling leaf. Where Raava draws strength from the peace and constancy of the world, Vaatu draws strength from the creation of the new and the destruction of the old.

“As Vaatu grew stronger, so too did the discord of the world. The lion turtles imparted fragments of their powers to humans, who used them selfishly, devising ever more destructive methods of waging their wars. Raava saw this and grew angry that Vaatu, the other half of their one-that-became-two, encouraged this among their creations. No longer was their embracing dance that of two-that-were-one, but that of enemies, locked in struggle. And then did Raava and Vaatu know  _adversary_.

“Raava joined with a human, who became the first Avatar, and together they suppressed Vaatu. The discord of humanity settled, but peace was evermore a fleeting thing, a waking dream never to be held for long. Even the light of Raava cannot hold order forever, and when the heavens align again, so too will Raava and Vaatu struggle for dominance in the next age. For from  _self_  sprang  _other_ , from  _other_ sprang  _discord_ , and so shall it be in every age until the quenching of  _self_.”

Rei coughed weakly, her voice ragged once more. “Is your purpose clearer now, Kyoshi?”

“No! If anything, it’s even less clear,” I said.

“Very well. Your purpose, as the Avatar of Raava, is to prevent the world from falling to ruin as a result of imbalance from the competing sparks of Raava and Vaatu we all hold in our hearts.”

She draws her hand along the little pool between us, sending out ripples along the still water. “You have the spirit of Raava within you as well, as did the one hundred and three Avatars who preceded you. That is why you can bend all the elements. You are the servant of no nation, no crown, and no cause but the tenuous balance left to us by the will of the great dragons, until such a time as when people can move past their divisions and petty conflicts.”

At  _petty conflicts_ , she looked pointedly at Yun, who had finally had enough. She got to her feet in one swift motion, and slammed the door shut as she left. “Wrath is unbecoming for a nun,” Rei said through another cough.

“And antagonizing people doesn’t seem very sagely,” I countered, standing up. “If she doesn’t stay here, I don’t stay here. We can go to the temple in the capital for my training.”

Rei continued drawing her fingers across the pool. “If you feel you would fare better in a place where no one speaks your tongue, under the thumb of the imperial court and the Jiwara clan, then leave. I will not take offense. But know this: Kasai is a viper pit, with a dagger behind every smile and an ulterior motive hidden in every kind word. Go at your own peril, Avatar Kyoshi.”

She managed to make it sound ominous without any real tone, and then fell silent again. Back in the antechamber, Yun was nowhere to be found amongst the devotees making their rounds among the statues. I groaned. “Upstairs, probably.”

“That stuff she said, is it true?” Nanuq asked. “Because I learned that the two primal spirits were hydras, not dragons.”

“I have no idea, I couldn’t even read a year ago. None of my past lives came up to correct her, but I don’t see how it matters either way. There are going to be problems to fix  _now_ , I don’t really care what happened thousands of years ago.” Ah, the door to my room was slightly ajar. The servants always made sure to close it. The sounds of pillows being struck was a good indicator, too.

She was on the edge of the bed, throwing quick hooks into the pillow in her lap. Wait, that was  _my_  pillow. I went and sat beside her, quietly rescuing my pillow from her grasp while I ran one hand through her hair. “Come on, it’s all right. Take a breath.”

“How do you deal with her every day?” she asked, seething. I gave her a good squeeze until her shaking stopped.

“I like to think of it as practice for dealing with difficult people.” Yun finally nuzzled into my side. “That’s better. I’m going to try and get some sleep before tonight, do you want to take Bima up or anything?”

“No, I’ll stay.”

She took off her shoes and pendant before rolling over to the side of my bed she had claimed for herself, since she had yet to use her own. I put my poor, innocent pillow back in its usual place and laid down before I noticed Nanuq still standing on the threshold, awkwardly rubbing his arm. It was almost endearing. “In or out, close the door either way.”

“Oh, I was just, I didn’t mean—all right,” he sputtered out while I gave the other half of the bed a quick pat. Yun put a possessive arm over me, but didn’t say anything as she nestled into my side. Nanuq kicked off his boots and curled up at the edge of the bed, keeping his back to me like a beaten stray. He rolled over when I nudged him, not quite against me, but closer.

⁂

“So what’s ‘Nanuq’ mean, anyway?”

I caught the water he tossed, then sent it in a quick spiral around my waist before lobbing it back. My evening waterbending practice was vastly more enjoyable than firebending. Conversation, practical instruction, an instructor with a general unwillingness to run me ragged…perhaps I should’ve gone to one of the Water Tribes first.

But then, I might not have met Nanuq.

“Not really sure it means anything,” he said, holding the water in midair. “There’s a word in Shuishei that sounds like it,  _nurinaq_. ‘Wolf.’ Catch!”

He threw the water straight up into the air, where the wind could influence it. I brought my hands over my head in a wide spiral and managed to catch most of it, while the rest ended up on my face or in my hair. “Oh, you little…”

My water whip technique was improving, as Nanuq learned firsthand. One end of the tendril snapped at his cheek and made him reel back in mock injury, clutching at his face as he staggered. I liked this. I liked Nanuq. When someone who was little more than a complete stranger offered to completely uproot his life in order to train me I was a little leery, but I figured that he had earned my trust so far.

“You’re a bit too cuddly to live up to your namesake, then,” I said, splitting the water into two arcing lines before guiding it back into its bowl. His laugh was nervous as he fussed with the collar of his vest.

“That really was these pants bunching up, you know.”

“Of course it was.”

He went red so easily. “So, is that face paint you have water-based?” he asked, reaching very, very far for another subject. “You could just bend it on if it is.”

“I don’t know, I’ve been putting it on the same way I always have. Habit’s hard to break.” I opened my bag and tossed one of the jars to him. “Here, go crazy.”

The paint was quite messy to an inexperienced person and truly a nightmare to get out of fabric, but he didn’t seem concerned as he pulled off the cap and looked at the red paint inside. Instead of touching it, he brought two fingers close to the edge, trying to tease a bit out. Nothing happened at first, and then some of it started shifting along with the motions of his hand, leaning and stretching as he willed it.

“How about that,” Nanuq said, and drew up a small amount. “There’s water in almost everything.”

He closed one eye and applied the paint to his bare skin and eyelid. It was a rough job, but leaps and bounds ahead of the first time I tried using it. I think I stained my collar completely red that day. “So how do I look?”

“Like this isn’t your first time playing with makeup,” I teased. He cracked a weak smile. “It isn’t, is it?”

“Sometimes my sisters made me help them with theirs, it…made sense to practice. Besides, it’s fun,” he said.

“It is. But the edges are too rough here, and if you’re going to use my paints, you’re going to get it right.” I sat down in front of him and tilted his head up for a better view. He didn’t do so badly, once I could see it up close. I licked my thumb and started wiping away the excess. “It goes halfway to the bridge of your nose, like this. And only as far down as the top of your cheekbone. So it stops right…here…”

He opened his mouth to say something, but stayed silent and instead looked anywhere but my eyes. We were awfully close, his cheek cupped in my hand and my face a few inches from his to see what I was doing in the low light. He met every motion of my hand with obedient resistance so that I could clean the last few spots near his eyebrow. “There, done. Now don’t you look pretty.”

We were playing a dangerous game, I realized too late. I pulled back, dropping my hands into my lap. Color started rising in my cheeks as much as his, but then he gave me another smile, small and sweet and warm.

Oh, I was in trouble.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sure, make the woman with the burned lungs give the big monologue.
> 
> I'm curious if you would prefer the release format I've had going where I put out a chapter every week, or something like a trickle/flood schedule where I put out a month's worth of chapters over the course of a single week. If you have a preference, feel free to let me know.


	16. Shame and Shadow

“All right, how do I unblock my fire chakra?”

Rei was waiting for me at our training grounds as usual, sitting atop her rock in a lotus position. She cracked one eye, looked me over, and closed it again. “I told you. Meditate. Chakras cannot be forced open, no matter how strong you are. Your inability to sit still and focus for a few minutes will not magically make another path appear.”

“You’re awfully rude for someone talking to the most powerful person in the world.”

“And you are awfully intransigent for someone so supposedly dedicated to becoming the most powerful person in the world,” Rei said with an edge in her voice. “Do you want to learn proper firebending, Avatar Kyoshi?”

Oh, she knew how it rankled me when people used my title that way. “Of course.”

She shrugged off her outer robes, leaving her arms and lower legs bare and her burns on display. Even with the scars, she was more beautiful than any of us, except maybe Nanuq. Rei looked at me in silence for a long moment with something maybe resembling softness, but I knew better by then. Her eyes were probably still adjusting to the light.

“Then you need to do the work.”

“I know, I know. But this isn’t something I’m good at, so can you slow down a little? Please?”

“As you wish.” Rei got up and took a step toward me. “Open your vest.”

She waited while I hesitated with the fastenings. “I didn’t wrap my chest today.”

“What difference does that make?”

I supposed if there was anyone who wouldn’t care…I undid the fastenings and let my vest fall open. Rei paused, looking at my body as if she was surveying me, then placed one palm at the bottom of my ribcage.

“Are you, um…interested in women?” I asked as her hand started to warm up. With the way she acted, I couldn’t imagine her being very interested in anything or anyone.

“Not that many opportunities exist for a sage, but I prefer the company of men,” Rei said, moving her hand to apply pressure beneath my ribs. “Though I see no reason to turn down a willing woman, nor have I in the past.”

So Yun was the picky one among us, then. “Your fire chakra, your  _manipura_ , is here, between your navel and the bottom of your ribs. If you force yourself to firebend without unblocking it, you will tire and eventually collapse. Your chi has to flow freely, and its channel is blocked now. Sit.”

Meditating, always more meditating. Rather than stay directly in front of me, Rei sat at my side and faced the opposite direction so she can keep her hand on my abdomen. “Are you trying to burn out the block there?” I asked.

She sent a rush of warmth through my body, pooling near my stomach. It was a lovely feeling, really. Without cramps to soak it up, I could get the full effect, and I wasn’t sure if I’d ever want her to stop. “Providing you with some sensation to focus on. The heat here is your fire chakra, in the same place where the third tattoo is on my back.”

“I meant to ask about those.”

“Meditate properly, and you may ask whatever question you want.”

Now there was something new. Getting Rei to talk at all felt like an exercise in futility sometimes, so I could hardly pass up the chance to ask whatever questions I wanted. “The fire chakra draws its strength from willpower—something you seem to have in no short supply—and shame will stymie it. What are you ashamed of?”

Going at Nanuq the way I did, most recently. He’d kept his distance during training and respected my request not to bring it up again, but I hadn’t gotten another nap out of him in two weeks. I rather liked being able to turn either way and have someone to cuddle. Being so hot and cold about it with him surely didn’t help.

She waited for several minutes, then turned to me when I didn’t respond. “Be honest with yourself, if not with me. Acknowledge the shame, accept it, let it sting. You can feel it as a knot in your stomach here, weighing you down. Is this shame something you can answer, something you can stop at the source?”

“I think so.”

“The  _manipura_  is an interesting chakra. You cannot let go of shame as simply as you can set aside fear or grief. It requires active amelioration to stop,” Rei said, moving her hand in a slow circle over my stomach. Oh, the warmth felt so good.

“Dumb peasant here, I don’t know that word.”

“If you can remove the source of the shame, you must do so. Forgiving yourself for it is not enough if the reason the shame exists in the first place can be eliminated. It will only come back again and again.” She paused for a particularly violent spate of coughing, her throat scratching like glasspaper.

Focus, Kyoshi. I took a deep breath and steeled myself for talking to Yun about this…whatever this was with Nanuq, no matter how awkward it might be or how empty a bed I might end up with. The little knot in my stomach untangled slightly, not enough to say it was gone but certainly less intense than it had been. This whole thing seemed more like a guilt issue to take up with my water chakra, but Rei was the expert.

“Very good,” she said, wearing the faintest inklings of a smile as she drew her hand away. I slowly redid the fastenings on my vest. “You may ask your question now.”

“Question? I have  _questions_.”

“And now you may ask me one of them. Every time you move on to another chakra—truly move on, not whatever poor excuse for meditation your lover tolerated from you—you may ask another.”

That was unfair, really. She waited patiently while I decided which question I wanted answered most. It was a good thing that she didn’t mention this before we started, or I wouldn’t have been able to concentrate. “All right. What’s with the whole emotionless routine?” I asked. “I did something similar when I was a fighter playing a character, but you’re way beyond that. It’s kind of creepy sometimes.”

Rei seemed confused at first, then averted her gaze at my last words. “I am not…creepy,” she mumbled, grimacing as if I’d hurt her. “I am not emotionless, either. Things are easier this way. What is there for me to feel? Pain when I remember my parents choosing my twin brother over me and selling me like chattel to the temple? I have no use for those feelings.”

Her voice was thick, so very unlike the cool, detached tone I was used to hearing from her. I turned to her and put a hand on her shoulder. “Your parents sold you?”

“I imagine they expected one child, not two. They were poor, and waited to see if one of us was a firebender. My brother Kaji showed it first, and so they sold me as a servant girl to the sages here.  _I_  was a firebender, too.” She hunched over, eyes watery. “Why…why am I crying?”

“Because you’re sad?” I offered, squeezing her shoulder. She was human after all, that was a relief. “It’s all right to feel sad about that, I would. My parents weren’t the greatest, either.”

She wiped her eyes dry and stared hard at the ground. “I have no use for sadness. For any of it. And this is not a _routine_ , as you call it. My temperance makes it easier to commune with spirits, the talent for which I was made a Fire Sage in the first place. Strong displays of emotion tend to repulse the friendlier spirits and attract the crueler ones.”

“You can talk to spirits?”

“ _Talking_ is not the right word, but yes. Sometimes. They can be fickle.” Her breath caught in what might have been a quick huff of laughter. “That was three questions.”

“Sorry.”

“No,” she said, finally meeting my gaze. She really wasn’t so different from me and Yun, a victim of her family with her own way of coping. I turned angry, Yun became avoidant, and Rei walled herself off. It was probably only a matter of time before I learned some awful family problem Nanuq has, too. “It was…nice, being able to share. The other sages have no interest in these things, and Kiku and I are no longer confidants as we were when we were both servants. Thank you.”

I went to hug her, slowly enough that she could pull back if she wanted to. All she did was blush a bit and lean in when I put my arms around her, careful to avoid her more badly burned skin. I wanted to ask about the scars at some point, too. As warm as Yun was, Rei was a furnace, and I wondered how she got through every day without sweating constantly.

“Why did you do that?” she asked when I let her out of my hug.

“Because I know how much it hurts to be alone.”

She grew very quiet and fiddled with the end of her braid. “May I ask you a question, Kyoshi?”

“Sure. I’ll even answer it,” I said with a smile. She didn’t seem to get my sense of humor.

_Wow._

_Think what you like, Korra, I was funny._

“What is it you feel you have to do to unblock your fire chakra?”

“Figure out if I really want to sleep with another one of my teachers and then bring up this whole mess with Yun,” I said.

Rei didn’t know how to react at first, beyond turning red again. “Yes…well. I need to prepare the temple for the return of the other sages. You may have the rest of the morning to do with as you please.”

“Wait, I meant Nanuq,” I blurted out as we got up, but she hurried off without another word. As if things weren’t awkward enough already. I really had to be more specific when I spoke. “One of you couldn’t keep me from sounding like a pervert?” I asked, and somewhere inside I swore I could hear a few past lives snickering. Oh, who was I kidding, I’d sound like a pervert no matter what.

⁂

“See, you’ve got too much hair to put it all up. Way too much. How do you wash this, it’s so thick…”

I drummed my fingers in my lap while Nanuq sat behind me, working my hair into a topknot to look nice for the other Fire Sages. I was counting on them getting back today, the whole routine was hell on my scalp. No wonder Rei opted for a braid instead. “Come on, tell me what you’re doing back there, I want to be able to do this myself if I have to,” I said, wincing as he tugged on a bit of hair right above my ear.

He traced a line on the back of my head, between my ears. “You take the hair up to this point, twist it up like this—”

“Ow!”

“Sorry. You get this bunch here and wind it until it’s about the length of your finger, make sure the rest is flowing downward, and then press these pieces to the sides. Slide the pin in here, and tie the fabric to keep it all in place. Tease some out at the top to make a little fan shape, and…there. Done. Simple, see?”

It felt secure enough when I shook my head from side to side. “Yeah, how did I not figure _that_ out…they expect people to do this without being able to see anything?”

“Yes, if you practice. Do you want to do anything with the rest, or let it hang loose? It really needs to be brushed out either way,” Nanuq said, idly threading some of it through his fingers. “I think it would look better down, maybe with some oils in it for a little shine.”

“At this rate you’ll be picking out my clothes too, what’s with you?”

He made a noncommittal sound, and I could see him shrug in the mirror before grabbing my brush. “Like I told you, I have older sisters. I learned these things. That’s just how it is in my tribe, everyone takes care of everyone.”

“Good policy. Listen, Nanuq, about the other week,” I said as he started to run the brush through my hair. “Ah, watch the knots! That thing I didn’t want to bring up again?”

“Are we bringing it up again?”

“Yes—all right, quit trying to work the knots out, that’s as neat as it’s going to get.” I reached back and took the brush before turning around to face him. “I was talking to Rei earlier about why I get so exhausted when I firebend, and there’s this chi problem and something called a  _manipura_ , and…I wasn’t paying very close attention to all the details, but I have to work through this thing with you to fix it.”

Nanuq waited for me to continue, sitting patiently on the bed with his goofy little smile. I drew my legs up as if to defend myself. “And to do that, I have to talk to you and Yun about where we go from here.”

“All right,” he said, leaning forward as he did. “So, where do we go from here?”

“I guess that depends on you and Yun, because I care about you both—”

The universe, ever ready to quash my well-laid plans, saw fit to start shaking the temple as if the whole island was ready to split in two. We nearly went falling off the bed before we got our balance back, and when I went to the window to check on Bima, I saw her cowering with her hooves over her face. “What in the world  _was_  that?” Nanuq asked, holding one of his bedposts for support.

As bad as the shaking was, the scream—if that was what it was—chilled my blood. It shattered the usual peace surrounding the temple, and it couldn’t just be a trick of the light when I saw the midday sky flash a few shades darker.

“Nothing good,” I said as Yun came barreling through the door, face white as a sheet. “Bima’s fine, it’s not her doing this.”

She breathed a sigh of relief and fell back on nervously thumbing the links of her pendant. Before she could ask what Nanuq was doing in our room, Rei stepped inside, back in her formal robes. “Yun, may I borrow your bison?” she asked, her voice as flat as ever. “Whatever is causing the fracas in Shinden needs addressing.”

“Bima’s not going anywhere without me.”

“Very well. Perhaps we should all go.”

It was my job, I supposed. “Come on, let’s go get her saddled,” I said. Rei stepped aside to let Yun and I lead the way down the stairs. “Thought I might get a little more training in before getting thrown into it like this.”

“Maybe it’s nothing,” Yun said. I didn’t reply. Whatever could terrify a bison and shake the ground like the island was sundering beneath us wasn’t nothing.

Rei’s presence put Bima on edge, even more so than she was already, but Yun seemed to be enough to keep her under control. I bent some stairs out of the ground to the saddle while Yun checked the reins, and we took off before I had the chance to flatten the ground again. Wisps of black smoke rose above Shinden, and with us off the ground I couldn’t feel if there was any more shaking.

“Any ideas about what’s causing this?” Nanuq asked. Rei nodded.

“Several. Few of them good. If fires need putting out, please do so. Yun, stay in the air in case we need to make a quick exit.”

For once, Rei’s cool tone was less perturbing and more reassuring. Having a plan visibly relaxed all of us, and we were able to breathe easier for a few minutes as the wind whipped around us.

It was a short flight back to the town—what was left of it. Large swaths of buildings laid collapsed or nearly so in ragged, random lines with no obvious cause. People were flooding the streets, fleeing something we couldn’t see, but in no particular direction. Everyone was just running. Torches in what was once a warehouse on the docks had lit the frame ablaze, and the fires licked at the surrounding, precariously balanced storehouses. There were similar sights all over the town, crushed homes and shops set alight by toppled lamps and torches.

Nanuq jumped off Bima as soon as she touched down and dove headfirst into the bay, emerging a few moments later atop a swirling spout of water. He brought his arms over his head in a wide arc, sending thick tendrils from the bay to the warehouse. The weight of the water collapsed what was left of the frame, but at least the flames went out before they could spread to the other buildings. With him handling the fires, Rei and I hopped out of the saddle before Yun took off again.

The pandemonium at ground level was even worse than it had been from the air. Everyone was screaming to no effect, creating a din that no single voice could penetrate. The acrid stench of smoke burned my nose, and the heat from the fires ripping through the streets was sweltering.

Rei simply couldn’t shout loudly enough for me to hear with her burned lungs, and instead waved me on toward the nearest street. A few people pushed past us, though it wasn’t clear where they thought they were going. All the ships were out in the bay and away from the docks, safely insulated from whatever was ripping the town apart.

Another blood-curdling scream tore through us, so loud and so sharp that it left my ears ringing. Rei clutched at her chest through her robes, staggering as if she’d been struck, and I lost her for a moment in the oncoming rush of fleeing people. Bima’s shadow drifted over us, and then she made a wild, cutting turn that was far too reckless, even for Yun. Our escape route gone, our waterbender occupied—so much for having a plan.

“Move!” I shouted in the broken Hitennese I had picked up from the temple servants, knocking a few townspeople aside as I went. Rei had been shoved up against a few stacked crates, trying fruitlessly to push her way back into the throng. I cleared a path for her to get back into the thick of it just as the crowd started to die down. The ground shook again from something big, close, and growing closer. Neither of us had to be an earthbender to know that.

“Wait here,” she said, and went around the next corner. I heard a quick blast of fire, and then a flurry of robes went flying in the opposite direction, crumpling with a sickening  _thud_  against a stone wall.

“Rei!”

I was running to her side, screaming her name while my stomach turned at the way the skin on the side of her face had been left on the wall. Thick lines of blood trickled around her widening eyes as I sat her up, and my hackles started to stand on end.

My heart tightened by slow, agonizing inches as I turned around and came face to face with the source of the destruction.  _Face_  might have been too generous for what I saw, though. There were things that looked like eyes and snapping, drooling openings that might have been mouths, all attached to a body with far too many limbs and composed of wisps of dark, swirling shadow.


	17. Shinden

The ground trembles again as the thing takes another shambling step toward me. How can a shadow even make noise like that? Its eyes are all over, but I can’t shake the feeling that it’s looking right at me, boring into my soul, and…pleading? I shake my head clear. Rei slumps over again, half her face and neck awash in fresh bright blood, and for the first time I can see something plainly in her eyes. Fear. I have to hope Nanuq returns in time to help her, I can hardly do anything with my rudimentary healing and hold off a monster at the same time.

Wet, snapping jowls draw my attention. The thing is still advancing on me, moving forward on far too many legs and dwarfing both me and the surrounding rubble. Somehow I know there are fangs there in the voids making up its mouths, sharp as blades and lined row after row. It looks at me for a moment, and I’m hit with the same odd, pleading feeling before it starts stomping wildly all over the ground, roaring loud enough to wake the dead as it does. Fractures snake through the street and into the handful of walls still standing.

I want to ask it what it wants, but my mouth is having trouble catching up with my mind. Instead I lift a piece of the street that’s already been ruined and hold it steady at my side, letting the thing see what I’m capable of sending its way. With any luck, it’ll think twice about coming any closer.

Either I have no luck, or the thing has no capacity to think once, let alone twice. Its second sound isn’t a roar but a screech, the same one that reached us all the way at the temple, and a charge accompanies its braying. I lob the piece of street forward, only for it to pass harmlessly through one of the monster’s legs. All I’ve managed to do is annoy it, wonderful. Some of its eyes shift attention to the momentary disturbance of its form, before turning back to bear down on me. All right, I can figure this out…

Fighting is much harder without a script. Whatever I do, I have to draw the monster away from Rei, who looks ready to pass out from shock. The left shoulder of her outfit is very much the wrong shade of red, discolored from her injury, and I don’t know how much more she can take.

“All right, come on,” I mutter, tearing up more of the street, this time in a thick wall keeping Rei out of its sight. I don’t know if it can ignore whatever solid thing it pleases, but now it only has me to focus on. A claw swipes toward me, slow and cautious. It’s feeling me out. Avoiding it is easy enough, but then another comes from the opposite direction, catching my side and sending a terrible chill through my body. The force slams me into a wood post that groans and ultimately gives way under my weight. I can’t hit it, but it can hit me…this is going to take some thinking.

Of course, I don’t have to think. My body moves by rote once I dislodge myself from the rubble, no thought required. Step, rotate, jab. Step, rotate, jab. Fire bursts from my fists and finally makes contact, disrupting whatever structure the monster’s body can claim to have. So fire works, but not earth. It rears back on a few of its legs while bits and pieces of it dissipate, and striking the joints seems to destroy the limbs. My foot flies out in a wide, sweeping kick, and a thin blade of flame follows with it. A few more legs collapse into nothingness, but not before a claw hooks around my waist and sends me very fast and very high into the air.

My stomach flips around in my body even as I manage to right myself. There’s a sickening moment when gravity hasn’t quite taken hold of me again, leaving me at a near standstill in the air. Bima’s in the middle of a reluctant turn my way, but she’s too far away to catch me. Nanuq is still in the middle of the bay, spraying water in a wide arc to get any fires he missed on the first pass.

And then I start to fall.

I try to airbend myself a slightly slower descent, but with no way to get enough of the spiral motion it requires, it’s not enough to make a difference. A swath of white fire tells me Rei’s gotten back on her feet, thankfully. I try and twist away from the blaze, leaving myself tumbling down toward the water. All I wanted to do today was open my fire chakra.

Nanuq notices me madly spinning my arms and turns away from the fires, instead pulling up a second spout to break my fall. It’s far from a smooth landing—hitting the water knocks the wind out of me—but nothing breaks other than the topmost fastening on my vest. Cold, salty water floods into my nose and mouth, burning the whole way through, and my eyes sting as I try to find my way back to the surface.

The water breaks around me as I try to suck in mouthfuls of air. My lungs stay defiantly empty despite my efforts, and panic floods through me as much as pain. In a ring I could drop to one knee for a few moments to recover, but no such option exists out on the open water. My head starts spinning, my body crying out for the air it so desperately needs. I have to get back to the docks before I pass out. What a pathetic end this would be.

Waterbending while surrounded by water is a predictably easy matter, even without having practiced it before. Enough of the motions are reflex by this point that I can carry them out without tasking my dizzied mind. A current spins up around me and I go toward the docks, striking against a post in the water as I manage to suck in a pitifully small mouthful of air. Better than nothing. Nanuq drops himself onto the dock above me and pulls me up, almost falling backward with the effort. I would thank him if I could get more than a weak flow of air to my lungs, but until that changes he can settle for my death grip on his shoulder. The water soaking through my clothes and hair slips away at the motions of his hands, and my breath finally starts coming back. I pull him over and wrap my arms around him, as much for support as thanks.

“Your diving technique needs work,” he says, trying to eke out a smile. I humor him until I remember—

“Rei!”

I pull him to his feet as Bima touches down nearby. “Hey, slow down, you just went flying, what happened?” he asks, bending all the water back into the bay.

“Giant shadow…thing, Rei’s still stuck with it, come on!”

Bima obligingly sticks out a leg for us to hold onto before lifting off again. I ignore a shock of pain in my shoulder as a gust of wind blows us around. We float over the handful of remaining rooftops to the street where the thing lobbed me, only to find it empty but for one scarred Fire Sage. Nanuq and I hop down to where Rei’s leaning against part of the wall I pulled up, clutching the red half of her face like it’ll fall off if she stops holding on. It very well might, for all I know. No shadow monster, I see. I dare to hope it’s been taken care of.

Nanuq bends the water still soaked into his clothes into a single mass and places it against Rei’s face, letting the glow brighten up the street while she winces. “Did you destroy that thing?” I ask, more optimistic than I really should be.

“It fled. For now.”

Of course it did. “Where?”

Rei looks pointedly at the ground, almost as if she’s unwilling to meet my gaze. Her voice is thick and muffled by pain and Nanuq holding her face still. “Into that small patch of shadows. It…melted.”

“Only solid when it wants to be, that’s just great.” I feel at the tears in my vest where it grabbed me. It was sure solid then. “So what do we do? Can’t exactly go around punching shadows.”

“When _what_ wants to be?” Yun asks, sliding off Bima’s neck. “An animal, a spirit? How could something big enough to do all this just melt away like you’re saying?”

“I’ve been having nightmares about things like that for months now,” I say, slamming my heel into the ground to pull up seats for the four of us. “Monsters made of shadows, big enough to toss people around like dolls…if it wasn’t a spirit, it was doing a damn good job imitating one.”

“Calling it a spirit would be too generous. That was a coalescence of spiritual energy with some basic awareness, but it was not a spirit in the way you understand them.” Rei waves off Nanuq, satisfied with his healing for the time being. The left half of her face is still bright red and raw, but better than the wall of blood and gore it had been. “Conscious enough to feel things like pain, and fear. This was not the meticulous work of single-minded fury, but that of a newborn thrashing about before it knows better.”

A newborn spirit. Fantastic. “How come my firebending worked, but earthbending didn’t?” I ask. “It was definitely solid when it tossed me into the water.”

“Water and earth are the elements aligned with Raava. Fire and air are the elements aligned with Vaatu. This thing is a product of fear and pain and anger, emotions that align it with the latter.” Rei’s so matter of fact about it, like she expects me to know all this. “Keep to airbending and firebending.”

Yun ignores the seat I’ve made for her and hovers at my side, fingers hooked protectively into the armhole on my vest. “None of that explains where it came from, or why it started tearing Shinden apart,” she says. “Wouldn’t a spirit—”

“Collection of spiritual energy,” Rei corrects.

“Wouldn’t it stay in the spirit world?”

I nod. “I’m supposed to be the bridge between the worlds, and that thing definitely didn’t come through me.”

Rei makes some kind of noncommittal noise bordering on a grunt. “You earthbenders are too literal…this thing was in our world, it stands to reason that it was the result of powerful human emotions.”

“So it’s a person?”

“It is most likely the product of several people, Nanuq,” she says, biting back a whimper when she touches a bit of her freshly healed skin. With less red, I can see she has a deep purple splotch around her left eye. I’d offer to show her how to cover that up if I thought she’d be interested. “I could not say exactly how many, but judging by how the number of mouths and limbs it had, almost certainly more than five.”

Her statement drains the color from Yun and Nanuq’s faces. I pick a rock out of the sole of my boot. “So how do we deal with it?”

“Securing the town should be our immediate concern,” Rei says, nodding to a few terrified villagers creeping out of their hidey-holes nearby. “Take count of the wounded and the dead. The bison should be able to ferry the most vulnerable back to the temple, and then we can focus on the monster.”

Yun balks. “Kyoshi’s in charge here, not you.”

“I don’t have any other suggestions,” I say, and Yun looks almost hurt that I didn’t back up her defiance. Now isn’t the time for their bickering. “Rei, you’re the only one of us who can speak Hitennese, find out what you can. Send anyone who needs healing to Nanuq. Yun can take people to the temple on Bima.”

“And what are you going to do?” Nanuq asks, looking pointedly at my cuts and bruises.

“Find that thing.”

Rei switches over to Hitennese for the benefit of the townspeople gathering around us, and two of them from the rear of their group come forward, clutching gashes and burns. Nanuq gathers up the water he used on Rei and rushes to work on them, struggling to keep the water level when they reel back in surprise. A few more words from Rei make them fall still so he can heal them, and some of the uninjured depart, presumably to gather others. I wish I could understand more than Chikyan. Tochi might be something I could do without, but those lessons in Hitennese and Shuishei need to happen, one way or another.

Yun grabs my wrist, ignoring the people milling around Bima. “Please don’t do anything stupid,” she says. I run my free hand through her hair and lean down to plant a light kiss on her lips. The back of my neck burns with the gaze of the villagers on us, but I don’t care. The only reason they still have anything left of their town is because of us.

“Relax. Surviving is one of the few things I’m good at. I don’t care if I have every spirit in the world bearing down on me, I’ll come back to you.”

“I—I’ll hold you to that,” she says, letting me out of her grip.

The unspoken words hang heavy in the air between us. I want to say it and I don’t have any doubt she’d say it back, but it’s not the time. Soon. Not now. “Okay. You and Nanuq stay here, Rei will send more people to you, I’m going to find out where that thing went. If it dropped into the shadows, it has to come out again somewhere. Rei, see what you can find out from the townspeople. Someone has to know something.”

She nods and begins directing more people in fast, flowing Hitennese. Nanuq turns over a piece of broken tile to use as a crude bowl for his healing water. Yun just leans against Bima’s leg and watches me round a corner, worry lined deep in her face.

I can focus on our relationship later, though. Right now I need to find this spirit or collection of spiritual energy or whatever it is before it comes back for round two with the town. But where do I start? It’s a bit past midday, and with all the recent…structural rearrangements, shadows are plentiful and largely connected to one another. At least none of them are moving, except for the one near the tree line.

Wait a minute.

Thankfully it’s not a gigantic, shambling mass, although that feels like a very relative blessing at the moment. A few swirling wisps are all I can see, but if Rei’s right and it can slip into shadows much smaller than itself, I may be in trouble. Suddenly all the little cuts and scrapes I got from my flight and landing feel much deeper. I know I _should_ go back and at least get Rei, spirits are her specialty, but…something’s drawing me to the tree line. It isn’t quite compelling me, more like a steady, persistent nudge. The forest—something in the forest, at least—wants me in there.

I take a few cautious steps forward, ready to grab my fans if need be. Everything gets a little crisper and cooler as I pass under the shadows of the trees. Whatever little hairs on the back of my neck that weren’t already standing spring to attention. It’s summer, it shouldn’t be this cold. It shouldn’t ever be this cold in the Fire Nation. Okay. Okay, I can do this. Breathe, Kyoshi.

The shadows calm down as I get closer, though they still seem more alive than shadows have any right to be. Nothing’s coming to attack me—yet—so I crouch down and run my hand over the shaded grass. Apart from it being a bit dewier than I would expect this late in the day, there’s nothing out of the ordinary about the shadows. The nudge is still there, coaxing me along.

“What is it you want?” I ask. “Something in the town? Something here, in the forest? I can’t let you run roughshod over Shinden. The people here are my responsibility, too.”

A few twigs snap underfoot, but not behind me. Deeper in the forest. I look up in time to see the fringe of a Water Tribe pelt disappear behind the trunk of a tree. Can’t be Nanuq, we’ve all adopted reds and golds…the one from my nightmares?” “Hey, wait!”

Well, the forest wanted me and now it’s got me. I’ve lost sight of my quarry, but my feet seem to carry me in the right direction regardless. My hand goes to the end of one of my fans. This guy costs me hours of sleep every week and now I have to deal with him while I’m awake, too? Maybe I can send him packing once and for all instead of watching shadows rip him apart night after night.

Shadows…

“Is that what you want? Him? Take him!” Branches rake across my face as I stumble through the thicket. Whispers rustle on the wind like leaves, in tongues at once familiar and unfamiliar. They say many things, meaningful and meaningless things, shouting over one another until I can hardly hear my own boots crunching in the undergrowth. I’m losing my mind—

People, now. Several people stand motionless in a line to my side, only visible out of the corner of my eye. A little Air Nomad woman with Yun’s pendant, a proud Hitennese noble with a hooked nose and flowing robes, a stolid Earth Kingdom man who looks to have more beard than face. And at the front of the line is the man in Water Tribe furs, eyes shining.

“Kuruk,” I whisper, my voice lost to their shouting. “You’re Kuruk, you’re the one costing me my sleep…have you laid your phantoms at my feet, too? Is this why I can’t even be alone in my own mind?”

Their glowing gazes burn into me as I slump against a tree trunk, my energy gone. All the voices cut like lashes, casting down my own. “Get out, please…get out.”

A hand strokes across my cheek, fixing some of my hair where it’s fallen out of place. I look up in time to see Yangchen crouched beside me, wearing the sad, weak smile I’ve read so much about. The shouting stops, leaving deafening silence in its place, and she vanishes into smoke along with the others. I feel cold again, cold and alone.

“Screaming in my ear or silent,” I say, unsure of who I’m speaking to. As if I don’t have larger problems to deal with right now. “You led me here. Why?”

My hand falls from the tree trunk and onto a stack of rocks. They’re piled too normally to be a natural formation, stacked neatly against the tree. I pick one up and turn it over, only to find dark red and brown splotches on the bottom that flake off on my fingers. Blood. Old blood, but not too old, still fresh with the smell of copper.

I pull up a few more of the rocks. They all have the same dried, flaking blood underneath. Once I get back to my feet, I replace them all and start making my way back to town. A familiar growl tells me Bima is overhead, somewhere past the trees.

Nanuq and Rei are working in concert when I return, having organized the survivors into groups. The more seriously injured go to Nanuq, while the rest get some of Rei’s healing firebending or reassuring words. Her stoicism is working in our favor again, providing a tranquil, calming influence.

“No dead so far,” Nanuq says, looking up as he heals a long cut on a man’s arm. “Yun’s already taken most of the children up to the temple.”

“Good, good. Rei, any news?”

She answers me in Hitennese before she remembers to switch back to Chikyan. What looks like embarrassment flashes on her face. “Seven people have gone missing in the past month. A shipwright, the town healer, the tanner and one of her assistants, two young girls…and my brother.”

The hesitation in her voice is the only indication of anything troubling her. “The one you mentioned? Your twin?”

“Yes. Kaji.”

“Does anyone know where they might be? What could’ve happened to them?”

“We already sent several people to the temple, I did not have time to question them all.” Rei nods to a man sitting against a ruined section of wall, holding a rag to his arm to stanch the bleeding there. “Ryu is a dockhand. His daughters are among the missing, the older girl is barely ten. He speaks some broken Chikyan, if you wish to ask your own questions.”

He notices me approaching and straightens up a bit. Rei rarely volunteers information, but telling the townspeople the Avatar was dealing with the problem might have set them at ease. He has a bit of a belly and a shining bald spot in the middle of his head, but what sticks out the most to me is the resigned fear carved into his face. “Ryu?” He nods. I kneel down beside him and speak a little slower than normal. “I’m Kyoshi. Rei tells me your daughters are missing.”

“Ayane and Yui,” he says, with a somewhat thicker accent than Rei. “They were playing in the commons a week ago while my sons and I were at work, they…they never came home. We’ve been looking ever since, but we haven’t found them.”

His speech is peppered with more Hitennese than I know, and I have to surmise some of the words I don’t understand. Eventually he slips fully into his native tongue, a long, panicked string of flowing sounds, and only calms down when I squeeze his shoulder. “We’ll find your daughters.”

The bloodied stones stick out all too clearly in my mind, and I hold my tongue back from promising any more than that. I leave him be and go back to Rei as she finishes healing a bruise on a woman’s shoulder. “I need a straight answer.”

“What else have I ever given you?”

“Are we searching for people, or bodies?” I ask.

“Yes.”

She might be older than me, but sometimes she gets on my nerves as well as a child would. “Which?”

“Are you under the impression that I know something I failed to share?” Annoyance flits through her eyes. Now that I know for sure that she has them, deciphering her emotions is an exercise in subtlety, requiring careful focus. “These people are missing. I do not know in what state we may find them, if at all.”

“We’ll find them.” I have to be able to help people if I want to call myself a decent Avatar. “Just need to know where to start looking. Ryu said they’ve been searching for a week and turned up nothing.”

“That is…not promising.”

Nanuq looks up as Bima returns with an empty saddle. “If we’re dealing with spirits, we should try the spirit world,” he says. “I have some kava at the temple we can use.”

Rei actually rolls her eyes while Nanuq fills Yun in on what we’ve learned. “All you need to do to enter the spirit world is meditate,” she says when she has Nanuq’s attention again. “Incenses and intoxicants are nothing but pageantry. But…given Kyoshi’s utter lack of talent for meditating, the pageantry may be faster.”

She says something in Hitennese to the remaining villagers, most of whom nod quickly, and then climbs into the saddle with us. “What’d you tell them?” I ask. Bima lurches forward, listing hard to the left to avoid the smoke still hanging in the air.

“The same thing you told me. That we would find their neighbors.”

Alive, I hope.


	18. A Human Work

The other Fire Sages are still absent when we return to the temple, leaving a frantic group of servants scrambling to wrangle the townspeople. Kiku, the head servant and the only person Rei ever seems to defer to, is directing people into groups spread around the antechamber in loud, clipped Hitennese. She’s less than thrilled when Bima touches down, rattling the people still outside.

“I just calmed them down!” she says, switching back to her broken Chikyan to properly admonish us.

Rei hops down from the saddle and looks past her, into the crowded temple. “We need the sanctuary, Kiku.”

“All right, let me get Naoko.”

She disappears into the crowd while Yun and Nanuq nudge Bima back to her usual spot and away from the still-cagey townspeople. “I thought you needed five Fire Sages to get in there,” I say, picking at some dried blood on my arm. “Or me.”

“That is a rule, not an absolute. Cleaning the sanctuary would be an enormous hassle otherwise. Any competent firebenders can open the door, and Kiku and Naoko are more than competent. I trained them. Have Nanuq bring whatever he needs to the sixth floor.”

The sinking feeling in my stomach worsens as I look up to the top of the building, its roof gleaming red and gold in the midafternoon sun. I’m going to the spirit world. For the second time, maybe. I hope this part of it isn’t as bleak as what I might have stumbled into near the Southern Air Temple.

Yun and Nanuq return from wrangling Bima, both covered in a thin sheen of sweat. “She found some fruit, she’ll be fine for a few hours,” Yun says. “So we’re ready to do this?”

I nod. “Nanuq, go get your kava, we’re going to the sanctuary.”

Shudan Temple was built for a small staff and a few dozen devotees at a time, not the eighty or so people currently crammed into the antechamber. It makes me feel a bit guilty about all the space sitting empty on the upper floors. None of the servants I can see speak Chikyan, and even if I could tell them to send people upstairs, they answer to Rei, not me.

Nanuq ducks into his room while we wait at the stairs, and he returns with a small bundle wrapped in plain white paper and secured with twine. “Where’d you get that?” Yun asks. “I can’t imagine that much of anything grows at the South Pole.”

“We have glasshouses, you know. But I got these roots from a farmer on Tuzi Island, a few days before we ran into you. My sister wouldn’t let me take any when Tiaraq and I left for the Northern Water Tribe.”

The smell of it hits me after a minute, sharp and sweet and pungent. Heady stuff. “This isn’t going to do anything bad to me, is it?”

“I guess that depends on what you consider _bad_ ,” Nanuq says, grinning until he notices my scowl. “Don’t worry, we’ll all be there. It’ll make your eyelids heavy and you’ll feel a bit…detached, then you’ll be in the spirit world.”

Yun gives him a skeptical look as we start up the last flight of stairs. “I think Rei and I will make do without it.”

“Suit yourself—”

The crackle of flame cuts him off, and the heat gets to us as we reach the top of the stairs. Kiku and Naoko, another servant, each have two jets of fire flowing into the sanctuary door’s locking mechanism, and Rei stands between them, striking the central lock with her white flames. Sweat trickles down my neck until the blasts stop, letting the maze of gears in the door unbar it from the frame.

Rei sends off Kuki and Naoko, and they slip past us as we walk inside. It’s markedly different from the chambers on the lower levels, with colored glass in the windows throwing light onto a floor inlaid with onyx and red marble. I can feel that it’s only a few inches thick with regular beams underneath, a sensible compromise for a room so high up, but it would have an appropriately awing effect on non-earthbenders. Yun and Nanuq seem properly impressed, but Rei is likely privy to the same information as me and doesn’t look nearly as taken. Or she just doesn’t care. Gold leaf in the shape of flames covers the parts of the walls not occupied by windows. Quite the extravagance for a room that’s barely ever seen.

Behind us, the door swings shut with a massive _thud_ , and its lock springs back into place. There’s a simple latch to open it from this side, thankfully. Rei takes four pillows from a nearby cabinet and lays them in the middle of the floor. “Do what you need and take a seat.”

She and Yun take two pillows across from one another while Nanuq unwraps his kava. It’s only a few roots, rather unremarkably shaped in my opinion, and he hands one to me before taking another for himself. The smell is even stronger out in the open, and it’s slightly oily in my fingers. I wonder how someone figured out this could do anything besides look like an ugly root.

“You don’t want to actually eat it, chewing it is enough,” Nanuq says, demonstrating be popping it into his mouth. “Maybe you should sit down first, though. You can get a little woozy the first time.”

Good idea. I take the pillow to Yun’s left and Nanuq takes the last one to her other side, arranging us in a square. “You’ve done this before, right?” I ask, stuffing the root into my mouth. Ugh, it’s beyond bitter…maybe I should’ve tried plain meditating first.

“Of course! Well, I watched Seleq when she did it, so I know what I’m doing. I think that was the correct dose.”

“What…”

I can’t get out anything else before my head starts swimming. The unsettling feeling of falling washes over me, forming a pit in my stomach and making me clutch at the floor for a sense of balance that never returns. My head is light and heavy all at once, and it’s all I can do to focus long enough to hear Nanuq trying to guide me through it. “Listen to my voice, Kyoshi…breathe, close your eyes and take a deep breath…”

 _No,_ I want to say. _Please, make it stop. I changed my mind._

But my mouth simply isn’t responding, and all I can manage is a dumb opening and closing along with some faint mumbling to show for my effort. I feel as if I’m filling up with tar as my shoulders slump and my eyes finally close despite my resistance. The same sickly, floating feeling as when I was thrown in the air hits me, and then I jump as the sensation of falling and crashing replaces it.

My eyes flash open, and the sanctuary is gone. The whole temple is gone. We’re in the spirit world.

Yun looks around, enraptured, while Rei and Nanuq are more interested in assessing the safety of our new surroundings. I guess the wonder of this wears off after doing it a few times. The sky is all mottled grays and blues, full of thin clouds spun into long spirals. I can’t see any sun, but it appears to be midafternoon anyway. The grass underneath us is an impossibly bright red, broken up in places by patches of deep violet flowers as big as my hand. If sounds aren’t divorced from there sources here, the rushing water nearby indicates a river.

“Wow,” Yun says, getting to her feet. A faint golden glow remains where she sat, the anchor point she needs to return to. “This is…wow.”

Rei follows her up and folds her arms. “The spirit world responds poorly to strong displays of emotion,” she says. She isn’t rasping for once, probably because I’m hearing her spirit’s voice rather than her body’s. Monotone aside, it’s surprisingly smooth. “We could easily find ourselves somewhere less pleasant from an outburst of fear or anger. Bear that in mind.”

Yun shifts a bit closer to me and holds onto the hem of my vest for a semblance of safety. The sunless sky starts to brighten and a crackling, energetic hum fills the air. We both look around, confused, while Nanuq laughs and even Rei cracks the barest traces of a smile.

“It reacts to good feelings, too. Safety, affection, love,” he says, pausing to watch our faces go red. “And you’re the Avatar, you’re half-spirit to start with, so it reacts especially strongly to you. I guess Yun should focus on keeping you happy in here.”

She does a fine job of that in our world, but it seems like it’s going to be even more important for the time being. I lean down to kiss the top of her head. “You already make me very happy,” I whisper, to which she shudders.

“We cannot stay here long,” Rei says as she takes a step forward. The burns on her arms are still there. I slip a hand under my vest and quickly find a scar to trace. So that kind of damage carries over, but not the burns on her lungs…strange. “Our bodies are still sitting comatose in the sanctuary, vulnerable to all our physical needs. The longer we linger here, the more harm we risk.”

“So where do we start?” I ask. Looking around, there don’t seem to be any spirits to ask for help. I don’t even know how to ask a spirit for help, really. Rei and Nanuq might have to do most of the hard work.

She points south, or what was south. “The part of the spirit world that exists in parallel with Shinden is this way. Starting there would be our wisest course.”

We fall in behind her, letting Rei guide us to our destination while we take in the strange sights. A few orange shrubs seem to be ignorant of gravity and hover several feet off the ground, roots stretching in all directions. Nanuq catches up with us and keeps pace as we walk. “I’m glad the kava worked, sometimes people don’t react so well.”

I want to go upside his head for lying about his level of experience with the stuff, but it worked, and the unpleasantness was over and done with much quicker than any bout of meditating I could manage. “Me too. Next time I’ll try to go without, though.”

“You two went out pretty quickly, it took us almost fifteen minutes to follow,” Yun says. “Do you really think we’ll find anything in here?”

“Maybe we can ask the spirit very, very nicely to stop thrashing through the town?” Nanuq asks, fiddling with one of the fastenings on his vest. His other hand keeps bumping into mine until I grasp it, threading up our fingers while I hold Yun securely on my other side. The sky brightens a little more. “Maybe it lost something important.”

Like its life. “Rei’s the one to ask about any of that.”

I don’t care if I’m being greedy, I like having them on either side of me. Having both of them here makes me happy. Rampaging spirits notwithstanding, I have to get this cleared up with them. If there’s a choice I have to make I would choose Yun, of course, but…well. That can wait until later.

The ground seems to move under our feet while we walk, letting us cover twice as much ground as in the real world. Convenient. It’s not quite as fast as a bison, but soon we’re at the equivalent of Baihe Island’s coastline, a steep cliff dropping off into the endless, swirling clouds around us. Out in the distance, an enormous lynx lion strides through the void on some unseen ground, paying us no more mind than we would an ant. Suddenly I feel very small.

“We won’t have to deal with stuff like that, will we?” Nanuq asks, still watching the passing creature. Rei shrugs.

“Perhaps. The spirit world is full of surprises.”

More surprises are the last thing I need. Rei stops us at the crest of a hill looking over a large, flat stretch of land. There are no buildings in the spirit world’s version of Shinden, just…I don’t know what these are supposed to be. It’s as if someone’s poked a bright, shimmering hole in a piece of fabric hanging across empty space. “What are those?” I ask.

“Tears,” Rei says, uncertain for once as she skitters down the hill to the flat area. She looks around for a long moment, counting the tears and wringing her hands as she does. There are six, all randomly scattered about. “Punctures from one world to the other…”

We follow her down, and Nanuq tries to touch the nearest one before pulling his hand back with a shiver. “Do you know what made them?” he asks. Somewhere close I can hear a faint buzzing, like thousands of fireflies. The bloodied stones surface in my mind again, and the sky grows a few shades darker.

The ground rumbles before she can offer an explanation, and the white-leafed trees to the north go flying, uprooted by something tearing out of the thicket. I couldn’t mistake the silhouette, even though it’s not made of shadow here. Maybe that was a mercy, I think as Yun gags. Rather than the dark swirls of shadow I saw in town, here it’s little more than a mountain of misshapen flesh, with arms and eyes and mouths in all the wrong places, braying like a wounded animal. All of us start backing away, but there’s only so far we can go before we get uncomfortably close to the edge of the island and the abyss beyond. It’s all in vain. The thing’s eyes fix on Rei as its wails turn to angry, guttural roars.

And then it charges.

Something holds Rei in place, but the rest of us aren’t as transfixed. Yun grabs her around the waist and yanks her, wrenching them both away before the thing can run her down. I don’t know who looks more shocked between the two of them, and I don’t have time to figure it out before the thing grinds to a halt and starting turning around. Well, firebending worked once. Step, rotate, jab.

It’s a rather strong punch, but no fire springs to life. I try again. Nothing. Can I not bend here? The fans on my belt are likely just as useless, and I don’t have time to test them before that thing come back around. How am I supposed to fight something four times my size?

The thick grass around my boots almost trips me as I run up to put myself in front of Rei and Yun. I can do this, I’ve been through nonbending fights before. We called it playing down, and the crowds loved the moment when one or both of us would start bending again. Not having that to fall back on now makes this feel a bit suicidal.

“All right, come on, come on…”

The thing isn’t having any of it, though. It simply steps around me and makes another lunge at Rei until I dive for one of its legs. Or what looks like a leg, it’s banded in thick muscle and supporting its body. Something inside the joint shatters with a sickening _crack_ and gives way against my shoulder, making it howl like metal screeching on metal. With a flick of its injured leg, I go flying again, but further rather than higher, and I end up rolling over and over near where the town limits would be, at the edge of the void.

Another howl, pained and furious. When my head stops spinning I see it limping off, every mouth snapping at Rei as Yun and Nanuq get her to her feet. The shock of pain spreading through my hip had better not follow me back into the human world.

“Thank you,” Rei says, looking hard at the ground.

Yun nods. “We’d probably get in trouble if you got killed in here.”

“Indeed.”

The usual tension between them simmers low for a moment, and Yun smiles at her before turning her attention to me. “Are you hurt?”

“I’m tired of being tossed,” I say, applying some pressure to my side. It’s an acute little stab of pain flaring up every few seconds, but nothing unmanageable. “That thing was after you, Rei. Only you. Just like in town.”

“Make any enemies the last time you were here?” Nanuq asks.

“No, I come here to…to find a measure of peace on difficult days, and the spirits always give me a wide berth unless I seek them out.” Rei looks past me, eyes widening. “Except today, it seems.”

We all turn and nearly fall backwards. The lynx lion striding through the lacuna between the islands is back, head bowed to get a better look at us, and it’s very close. With a better view, I can see its fur shining like diamonds in the sourceless light, and its eyes have all manner of patterns inscribed into the irises. Fluffy ears twitch in its long red mane while it sniffs.

It’s not attacking us, so that’s a step in the right direction. The spirit regards us for a minute, its head gradually tilting from side to side for a different view. Yun and Nanuq are interested, while Rei and I take a more cautious stance. She’s understandably wary of spirits at the moment, I just don’t like anything bigger than me.

“What do you want?” Rei asks, standing still as it inspects her, robes billowing as its breath hits.

“You smell…familiar,” it says, sniffing noisily at her hair and shoulders. “But you look different. Sound different. Your blood is evener. How strange.”

Familiar? Maybe it recognizes her from other trips here. Rei takes a step back when it leans away. “Name yourself, spirit.”

“Name myself? Names are human things. What use do I have for a name? I know who I am. I am me,” it says. “Your kind gives us names.”

I’m sure Rei can debate the finer points of semantics for quite a while, and the spirit seems willing to indulge her, but the deadline she gave us looms in my mind. “Can you help us?” I ask, trying to draw its attention. “The spirit that just came stomping through. We need to find out where it came from and stop it. Shinden can’t take another beating.”

“Hello, Raava.” I jump back as its face lurches toward me, whiskers drifting dangerously close to my head. “Brave of you to show your face here. Different face. But the blood of your shells always smells the same.”

One whisker brushes on my cheek, and a chill runs down my spine. “Do you have a problem with the Avatar?”

“No. But others might. The last one was no friend to the spirits.”

“Kuruk?” Yun asks, falling into place at my side. “What’d he do?”

She recoils a bit when the spirit inspects her, taking a deep look into her eyes before turning back to me. “What indeed…my, my. Isn’t your blood interesting, so twisted up with that one’s.” It smiles, or makes the closest approximation of a smile it can. “Rather different context with this shell?”

“What?” we both ask.

It ignores us to titter softly to itself before dropping back to disaffection. “As amusing as humans always are, I can’t help you. That youkai is a human work, silent to me. You should ask Yonheng, the patron spirit of Baihe. That one loves humans. Up that way, past the trees,” it says, looking vaguely west.

Nanuq cocks an eyebrow. “I thought you just said spirits didn’t have names.”

“Your kind gave him that name. You’re welcome to wander aimlessly, if you prefer. Most humans do, one way or another. Farewell, Raava. Do try to make less mess this time, you ran off with that first human and left us to clean up after you.”

The spirit draws away from us and starts lumbering off into the fog. “Well, we know where to go now,” Nanuq says, and we head west. Rei grabs my wrist and pulls me back, leaving us behind Nanuq and Yun.

“Chuji is the patron spirit of this island, not Yonheng,” she says quietly.

“So the big one lied to us?”

“Our concepts of truth and falsehood have little meaning here. Many spirits enjoy toying with humans whenever they can, and we must be careful. This is a very dangerous place.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Kava](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kava), not even once


	19. A Very Dangerous Place

“I had a question before we started today, if that’s all right,” Asami says, leaning forward a bit.

“Considering you’re the only one of your friends who hasn’t yet interrupted me, you may ask whatever you’d like.”

The rest of them shift uncomfortably under my gaze. “Almost everyone around you seemed to be some kind of bender, were there any important nonbenders around that you ran into?”

In retrospect it seems obvious she would be the one to ask that kind of question, but I don’t know how much any of them will like the answer. “Yes, I knew plenty of important nonbenders. Fire Lord Muryo, for one. When I started the group that became the Kyoshi Warriors—I did _not_ care for their change in name after I died, please tell them that—it consisted entirely of nonbender women. I was still mastering the elements at this point, and I needed bending masters for that.”

She seems satisfied with my answer, but not totally, so I ask a question of my own. “How much of the population can bend now?”

“About one in ten,” Korra says.

“In my day, it was closer to one in three. Sozin’s war claimed all but one of the airbenders, and benders of the other nations were among the first drafted on both sides. The opening salvos of the war thinned their ranks considerably, and they never recovered. What Aang and his friends stopped was the dying breath of a conflict that had run itself ragged decades before.”

Mako cocks a funny-shaped eyebrow. “How do you know all this? It was after your time.”

“Korra isn’t the only Avatar with resourceful friends,” I say, and smile a bit at their confusion. “Shall we continue?”

⁂

The Baihe Forest doesn’t feel quite so harmless in the spirit world.

Here, the angles of the trees seem to press down on us, almost garish with their blue bark and pink leaves, and more than once I find myself clenching my fists and grinding my teeth as I step around the little thickets of knots walking about under our feet. How Rei can come here to relax is beyond me.

“You know how to get through here, don’t you?” I ask, nails digging into my palm again. Yun has the side of my vest in a death grip, and Nanuq is putting on a brave face to my right. The grass starts frosting up at our feet, icing over and cracking when we draw our boots away. This is not a place for humans.

“Sometimes the forest changes,” Rei says, bending back a branch so we can pass through. Wood really shouldn’t be that springy. “Especially in response to our moods. This is why I tried to impress upon you the importance of staying calm, since as intruders, the spirit world will respond much more strongly to our presence. We are as a sickness, and the spirit world is a body that will attempt to destroy us if we make too much trouble.”

“Kyoshi’s hardly an intruder,” Nanuq says as he brushes a fallen leaf from his shoulder. “Well, half-intruder. Shouldn’t the Avatar spirit get a pass?”

Rei shakes her head. “Such fine distinctions mean little here. We are all purely human to them, believe me.”

Well, that’s just great. If I can’t bend or at least pull rank on the spirits, why even come in the first place? All I can do is lend legitimacy, and even that’s because of what I am, not what I do. Yun and I should have stayed back and kept watch in the sanctuary, Rei and Nanuq are the only ones who seem to know what they’re doing here.

“Any ideas for what to do when we find this Yonheng?” I ask. Rei pauses for a moment to think, and then starts leading again.

“Best not to challenge its assumed position as patron spirit of Baihe, or mention Chuji at all. Spirits can react…unpredictably when humans refuse to play their games. Flatter, soothe, extract the information promptly, and leave. With any luck, it will be in a talkative mood. Let me handle it.”

No argument from me there. If what the lynx lion said was true, Kuruk might have tainted my reputation here. All those dreams would make a lot more sense, seeing him fighting their extrusions into our world. Thanks a lot, Kuruk. Couldn’t even leave anything helpful for me.

“Those are beautiful,” Yun says, looking over at a shrub with enormous bone-white flowers dotted with yellow and violent speckles. Sure, they look nice, but…are they turning toward us? Yes, yes they are. The whole plant starts craning our way as if enjoying the praise, and then some of its roots slip from the ground. “What in the world?”

“Everything here is a spirit. Everything. And you paid that one a compliment.” Rei tenses up as the plant starts heading our way, stumbling along on its roots. “Some of them find humans interesting. Be careful.”

Nanuq and I try to give the plant a wide berth, but Yun is far too interested in it, slowing her stride to let it walk up beside her. I’m not sure how a plant shows its excitement, but it certainly seems that way as it begins bouncing up and down on its roots and spinning its flowers to create a dizzying display. “Careful of what?” Yun asks, waving her hands and watching some of the flowers imitate the motion. “That other spirit was helpful, why do you think this one won’t be?”

It hasn’t done anything against us, true, but it’s a good deal harder to read a plant than a lynx lion. The sky darkens a shade, and thunder claps somewhere in the distance. I really, really don’t want Yun near that thing, and it seems to know. Some of the flowers facing me start opening and closing rapidly, and I’m at a loss for how to respond.

“We need to keep going,” Rei says, and Nanuq jumps at the chance to move on. “Time is not on our side here.”

“All the more reason to make the most of it, then.” Yun kneels down until she’s level with most of the flowers. I can’t watch any more of this. She’s talking to a plant, for goodness’ sake. “We’re looking for a certain spirit, is this the way we should go to find Yonheng?”

For whatever reason, that was very much the wrong thing to say. All the shrub’s flowers close up, and one of its roots whips out at Yun’s side before it scampers off. Her hand clamps over the scratch as it disappears into the trees. What a wonderful time to be without my firebending. I run up to her, just in time to have her sink back into my arms. When her hand falls, what should have been a minor scrape through her robes is turning a sickly green before my eyes, and all she can do is gurgle something unintelligible.

“You fool,” Rei chokes out, lifting the side of Yun’s robe to inspect the damage. “I told you this place was dangerous, I told you. You want to think every spirit is sweet and kind like you…”

“What did it do to her?” I ask as she starts going limp in my arms. “Rei, what did it do?”

“I do not know!”

Without the damage to her lungs, Rei can shout properly, and she sounds terrified. That…doesn’t inspire a great deal of confidence, not in us and not in our surroundings. The trees nearby gnarl up, their leaves shrivel and fall, and the grass at our feet stands on end like countless tiny knives. “We need to calm down,” Nanuq says. Yun slumps against me. “The spirit world will only make things harder for us if we panic.”

“Then I very calmly need to find out what the fuck is happening to her and how to fix it,” I snap. There’s another clap of thunder, much closer than the last.

Rei tugs on her braid until she’s able to collect herself. “We should continue with our original plan. No doubt we scared off most spirits for a good distance, this interloper Yonheng may be our best chance for answers.”

“Fine, let’s go.” I pick Yun up so she’s cradled in my arms, and I hope us being spirits with no need for air is why she’s not breathing. We double our pace as best we can with so much foliage now covering the ground. “Rei…what happens to spirits who can’t return their bodies?”

Her silence isn’t inspiring, either.

We find the tree line after a few long minutes of jogging, which in our world opens onto a flat stretch of land leading into more forest. Here, it’s where a hill starts sloping upward. The incline seems to steepen as we start heading up, its gentle roll turning almost into an escarpment under our feet, as if the ground itself doesn’t want us treading upon it. I mumble an apology and carefully put Yun over my shoulder, but it’s a short-lived solution. I can _hear_ whatever it is that thing’s done to her, thrumming in her side, and so I put her against my chest again. My eyes burn with tears, and day slips into twilight around us. “Don’t you dare die, understand?”

“She’ll be okay,” Nanuq says, climbing the hill on all fours.

“I’ll tear this place apart if she’s not.”

Mercifully, the hill levels out into a plateau after far too long, though to look around I would think we’d barely climbed anything at all. The burn in my legs says otherwise. Rei and Nanuq wait while I set Yun down and nudge her upper robes to check on her injury. Normally seeing her tummy arouses a very different set of feelings, but right now all I get is fear. The web of veins normally hidden below her skin is protruding, creating a nauseous green map of the path her blood takes, and more becomes visible with each passing minute.

“Where’s this patron spirit?” I ask, scooping her up again.

Rei points to a single bare tree in the middle of the plateau. “There, if I had to guess. And _please_ …be careful. Let me do the talking.”

I’d probably go right into yelling anyway. Nanuq and I follow behind her, and then we see a figure sitting at the base of the tree, a spirit in the shape of a man or a woman swathed in shimmering robes, plucking at some kind of warped liuqin. Its skin and white hair glow faintly, and it watches with a silent smile as we approach.

After a moment of examination, Rei shakes her head and looks around. “Enough of this artifice. Show yourself.”

“Aren’t you a smart one.”

The spirit fades away, and the new voice comes from behind us. We turn and see…well, it’s not quite a snake and it’s not quite a bird. Its body is as thick as both my legs put together, long and coiled and totally covered in silky black scales. A ring of blood-red feathers marks the division between its body and head, which is adorned with a pair of beady yellow eyes and a bright white beak. Its soft clicking is the only sound on the otherwise silent plateau.

“Oh, the first bridge, of course,” it says, twirling around Rei, beak nipping dangerously close to her neck before one of its eyes turns to me and Nanuq. First bridge? “What brings such interesting humans to my humble tree?”

It unfurls from Rei and coils most of its body around one of the closest branches, hanging loosely as it looks at us upside-down. “Someone should tell your friend the spirit world is no place for a nap.”

I grit my teeth at his mocking tone, but I hold my tongue and shift Yun around to get a better grip while Rei does the talking. “She was struck by another spirit, we need to reverse whatever happened to her. We also need information about the one laying waste to Shinden.”

How does this thing pout with a beak? “So many demands of poor Yonheng, so many indeed. You travel with such fascinating companions, Raava,” it says, leveling its gaze at me.

“My name is Kyoshi.”

“Is it…you change your shells so often, why bother learning their names? The last one had a bad habit of putting Koh in a foul mood and leaving the rest of us to deal with him. This one doesn’t seem so special. Taller, maybe. Softer voice. Oh, but you didn’t come here to listen to foolish old Yonheng. You want things, all you selfish little shells want things.”

Off in the distance, it sounds like someone’s ripped a pair of holes through some soaked fabric. Rei grimaces and lays a hand over her stomach, and Nanuq shudders. I guess the same chill ran through them. “I need to know how to fix whatever that miserable shrub did to Yun.”

“We have to find out how to deal with that spirit, Kyoshi,” Rei says.

“ _Yun first_.”

Nanuq jumps back as Yonheng stretches toward my face. “Making up for lost time? No matter. If a fangling did this to her, all she needs is a bit of water. For all its speed, their venom is quite soluble. Now go, Raava, and take your friends with you. You aren’t nearly as interesting as I’d hoped.”

“What about the spirit?” Rei asks.

“I’ve already given you what you asked for, and out of the goodness of my heart.” The sides of its beak somehow curl into a small smile. “Anything more will come at a price.”

Nanuq unstops the water skin on his hip, but it’s bone-dry. “Oh. What a shame. You should find some soon, fangling venom is frightfully fast.”

There isn’t much choice. “What do you want?” I ask.

It makes a show of thinking, but we all know better. “A pittance,” it finally says, tail waving in the empty air. “From each of you, and the sleeping one. Something you might even enjoy being rid of. A sliver of your mortality.”

“No,” Rei says.

My eyes narrow. “You want to shorten our lifespans?” Nanuq asks.

“Quite the opposite.”

That doesn’t seem like a terrible deal, really—

“ _No_ ,” Rei says again. “Kyoshi, spirits are not meant to leave this world, even in death. This price is too high. We can find the information elsewhere.”

Yonheng slithers through the air, over to Rei. “Such a long way to come for you to abandon your search now, I thought you humans were always interested in living longer. It may even sustain your ill friend. Oh well. Poor Yonheng will ply his knowledge elsewhere.”

“Would a bit of mortality really kill a spirit?” I ask, painfully aware of Yun growing colder in my arms. “We can’t stay much longer, and I’m not waiting around to find another one before I help Yun.”

“Kyoshi, we are toying with forces beyond our ken, please—” She turns to Nanuq for some support, but he only looks like he wants to leave. Anger flashes in her face, real anger, before she slips back into the dispassionate mask she wears so well. “ _Tenbatsu_ …on your head be the consequences, Avatar.”

The spirit is practically writhing with glee when it levels itself with my face. “Fine,” I say. “Take your price and tell us what you know.”

Four thin tendrils of light snake out from its feathers, one pressing to each of our foreheads, on the light chakra. My skin burns and I feel ready to throw up, but it only lasts a moment. A hand grips weakly at my vest. Oh, Yun…I let this spirit tear away a piece of her without her even knowing. Some Avatar I am.

I don’t have time to reflect on it before Rei staggers toward Yonheng as it begins crumbling before our eyes. Its shadow changes shape, from a snake, to a shrub, to a lynx lion. “That was not…not nearly enough,” Rei says, sounding strangely parched.

“From you, no. But combined with the _other_ eight—”

She grabs it by the neck, but it turns to ashes in her grip. “Tell us what you know,” she says through a snarl.

“Ask your brother,” Yonheng answers, and then he’s gone, dust swirling in the wind.


	20. Heaven’s Crushing Silence

Rei throws her hands out at her sides, enveloping a wide swath of empty air. Her jaw is set hard, making an unfamiliar line where there’s usually such a soft curve. The slightest trace of dust still lingers on her palm until the wind blows it away. “Behold the fruits of your sacrifice. You unbound a spirit from its domain and toyed with the fabric of our lives for _nothing_ ,” she says, almost spitting the word as lightning cracks around us.

She’s shaking, I realize, and nearly on the verge of tears. How could this have affected her so badly? What am I missing? “Rei—”

“I can say nothing more on this now, Avatar. We should find some water for Yun.”

On that we can agree, and Nanuq, who’s been quietly waiting out our disagreement, jumps at the chance to take charge with his native element and finally be rid of this place. Can’t say I feel any differently. “We came in over there,” he says, pointing to the northeast. “And I could definitely hear a stream nearby. I can probably carry Yun the rest of the way, you know.”

“I’m fine.” Yun’s probably the only thing keeping Rei from physically tearing into me apart from her usual restraint, which seems to be flagging. She seethes openly as we follow Nanuq, and more than once I catch her wiping away a tear. “We know where to start, at least.”

“Kaji is nowhere to be found. How am I to ask him anything?”

With that, she shuts off any further conversation and picks up her pace, following Nanuq at the same clip he was using to get away from the two of us. All right. Once we help Yun, we can get back to this. To think it was only this morning that I was hugging her and making some progress with befriending her. It seems like so long ago.

Nanuq has the right of it—even as a spirit he has a natural affinity for water—and we come across a small, winding stream overlooking the four gold wisps marking our point of return. I sit Yun in front of me and prop her up while Nanuq fills his water skin. Rei stands off to the side, arms crossed and her gaze fixed intently away from me, but every now and then concern flashes over her face and she glances down at Yun. Maybe there’s hope for them, after all.

“Does she drink this, or does it go on the wound?” Nanuq asks. I shrug. “Let’s do both, to be safe.”

He dribbles about half the water over her side once I move her robe, but that has no effect we can see, so he puts the top of the water skin to her lips. Tipping it forward slowly enough to keep from drowning her is a delicate process, but he’s slow and methodical, and I rub her throat to try and get her to swallow it. The knot in my stomach unravels when Yun starts coughing and sputtering in my arms, spraying Nanuq with a face full of spit and water. He smiles weakly, dipping wet, and even Rei sighs in relief. The whole world springs back into midday, bright and warm and welcoming.

“In my tribe, that means we’re married now,” Nanuq says, wiping his face dry as I squeeze her. “Sorry, Kyoshi.”

“Yeah, yeah…” She turns around in my grasp and buries her face in the crook of my shoulder. I’m glad I’m not wearing my face paint, it’d be running. “Don’t go playing with spirits, understand?”

“Duly noted.”

“We need to leave,” Rei says, lifting Nanuq by the collar. “Back to our bodies.”

Suddenly I can feel the burn in my arms now that Yun’s moving under her own power. It’s a sweet kind of ache. I wonder if that’s going to carry over, the rules don’t seem entirely consistent. “Yun, lift up your robe on the side here.”

“Usually you wait until we’re alone for that,” she says coyly, but does so after a moment. The web of veins is still there, and she traces a few fingers over the mess, shivering as she does. “I think I have a cooler scar than you now.”

“At least it’s not still green.”

The conversation about the price of Yonheng’s information can wait until we’ve gotten back to our world and found Rei’s brother. Yonheng called her the _first bridge_ …whatever that means. It’s something else to find out later, maybe once she’s feeling more talkative.

We all sit in the same arrangement at the four little points of light, with Rei to my left, Yun to my right, and Nanuq across from me. “Returning is a lot easier,” Yun says, closing her eyes. “Our spirits will naturally want to get back. Visualize the sanctuary, take a deep breath…”

This is much nicer than the kava trip it took to get in. It’s a strange sensation to have the wind and chill of the grass underneath me slip away, to give myself over to the void between our worlds, but soon enough feeling starts to return. The pillow I’m sitting on, the slightly musty smell of the sanctuary, the scratchy burn in my lungs. Wait—

My eyes open, and now Yun is across from me, Nanuq is to my left, and to my right is…is…well, it’s me. Every little scrape and scar is visible on my bare arm, and I can see a spot below my left ear where I missed wiping off some of my face paint. Am I really that big? Everyone else starts coming to and looking around with dawning confusion, apart from Nanuq, who simply rolls his eyes. I look down, into my lap. These hands are far too pale, callused by flame, and scars on the undersides of the forearms strain against any motion.

And then the pain hits.

Every nerve goes alight at once, digging in like thousands of hot knives across every inch of scarred skin. If I had any confusion about the extent of Rei’s burns or where they reached, it melts away in a few short seconds. “Right orientation, wrong positions,” Nanuq—Rei, rather—says, his voice utterly flat as he shifts his hips from side to side. “Hmm. I always wondered what having one of these would feel like. Cumbersome.”

 _Help_ , I try to say, but the voice only comes out as a short rasp. Instead I double over, spots dancing in my vision as my head spins. “She needs to get into the spirit world again before she passes out,” Nanuq says, going over to the cabinet. “Prop her up.”

Yun uses my body to get me back into a proper lotus position, wincing when I gasp at the touch. I never noticed how green my eyes are. “Don’t worry, we’ll get this fixed,” she says, but I can barely appreciate the humor in having my own voice try to comfort me before a fresh, sickening wave of pain courses through my borrowed body. I’m going to throw up, how does she—how can she live like this?

Nanuq returns with another kava root and shoves it unceremoniously into Rei’s mouth, holding onto her jaw to make her chew. I’m well beyond such a conscious, deliberate decision. “Back in we go,” he says, stuffing what I think was the last root into Yun’s mouth before settling onto his pillow. “I imagine this is a rather different way for you to be inside the Avatar, Yun.”

I don’t have the chance to hear any response before the haze slips over me again. The pain doesn’t exactly stop, but it does dull enough so that I can hear my own thoughts again. I can’t keep Rei’s eyes open any longer, but this time I’m happy to fall into the emptiness. I fall headfirst into the void again, emerging back in the field in my own skin, or at least with the proper projection of my spirit.

“That was a waste of time,” Rei says, pressing a hand between her legs to make sure she’s back in the right body. “Change places.”

“What was it like being the Avatar for two minutes, Yun?” Nanuq asks.

“I felt…very big,” she says, looking down into her lap. “Very strong.”

“Rei, how do you live like that? How can you walk around with that kind of pain every second of every day and not say a word?” I ask. The afterimage of the burns is still there, tingling all over my skin.

She refuses to meet my gaze. Refuses to let me pity her. “I manage. Thanks to you I will manage a while longer.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? We could’ve found the information some other way.” Now I just feel like an ass.

“To what end?” she counters. “It was your decision, and the Fire Sages are bound to serve the Avatar…no matter how asinine her decisions may be…and had we been delayed on my account, every other life hanging in the balance would have been on my head. If you want to set this right, help me find my brother.”

I lean over and hug her, and before long Yun and Nanuq join me. “Enough,” Rei says quietly, making no motion to push us away. “We will lose our places again.”

With no small amount of care, we get into the right spots and go through the same process. I’ll be happy not to deal with this place again for a while.

Back in the sanctuary, we all take a cautious look down at the bodies we fall into. Dark skin and scars, perfect. Yun almost jumps into my arms, and Rei winces as the feeling of her burns comes back. I lift the side of Yun’s robes and see the veins, thrust out prominently against the otherwise smooth skin there. “Cool scar,” I say.

“I’ll live. Thanks to you.”

“How do you walk around with those things, honestly,” Rei mumbles, working a kink out of her neck.

“You get used to it. So…what do we do now?” Nanuq asks, sighing in relief when he puts a hand over his chest and finds everything properly flat. “It’s getting dark. Would anyone in town know where your brother might be?”

“Our parents, perhaps. Their property is a ways from Shinden proper. I…I would not begrudge the rest of you staying here,” she says as she tugs on her braid. “I apologize for getting you all drawn into my family affairs.”

I shrug. “What are friends for?”

She looks at me for a hard moment, her lips still drawn in a grimace from a fresh round of pain, but then nods.

We clean up the sanctuary and head back out, where four men are waiting for us, wearing robes almost identical to Rei’s apart from being tighter in the chest and slightly more generous around the waist. They’re all looking a bit haggard with varying stages of stubble covering their faces, and I can’t believe anyone could take them seriously with those pointed hats.

“Daisuke- _sejimasitou_ ,” Rei says, giving them a small bow. “Saburou, Aoi, Hiroto- _seji. Kore wa_ Kyoshi _-touin._ Avatar Kyoshi, our head sage Daisuke and my colleagues, Saburou, Aoi, and Hiroto.”

She starts in with more Hitennese I can’t hope to follow, motioning occasionally to the three of us behind her, and then the other sages give me a long, respectful bow. Parts of their conversation sound familiar, but all I can really do is pick out cognates between Chikyan and Hitennese. I can’t tell if Rei has the same vendetta against contractions in her native tongue too before she turns back to us. “I have leave to go and put this matter to rest. We should go while we still have some daylight.”

“Let’s head out, then.”

The other sages step back to let us shuffle down the stairs, and once we get to the antechamber we can see that many of the people Yun ferried in from the town have left. Some remain, bedded down in uneven rows with blankets the servants are handing out. “How long were we in there?” I ask.

Nanuq pats his water skin to make sure it’s actually filled in this world. “It can be hard to tell, time gets sort of…twisted up in the spirit world. Probably a few hours,” he says. “Unless we were in there for over a day and it all rolled over.”

Rei rolls her eyes. “Doubtful. Yun, how well can your bison navigate in twilight?”

“She can fly in total darkness if I know where to steer her.”

Bima is loafing around outside, pawing idly at the air until she notices Yun walking over. Once she’s rolled off her side, we can climb up into the saddle and take stock. Despite our bodies sitting idle for several hours, no one seems particularly rested. Someday I’ll have to figure out how things carry over.

“The Takarabe farm is a quarter-mile due east of Shinden. Bear left from your last path.”

I cock my head. “You told me your family was poor.”

“They were,” Rei says, her voice edging on bitterness. “My confirmation as a Fire Sage helped change their fortunes.”

She stares emptily out over the forest, and I know the topic is closed. I’m hitting all kinds of dead ends with her today. Instead I shuffle over to the front of the saddle, leaning down until I’ve almost gotten close enough to nuzzle Yun. “Listen, about the spirit world, there was this one spirit we had to make a deal with—”

“I was still conscious, Kyoshi. I could hear everything, I know what happened. That spirit tricked you into giving up some of our mortality.”

“You’re not mad?”

Several long moments pass before she shrugs halfheartedly. “It’s not a decision I’d want to have to make, but I don’t know that I would have done anything differently. Besides,” she says, reaching back to kiss my cheek, “it’s more time I get to spend with you.”

Ever the optimist. Rei’s family’s property is barely visible in the last minutes of sunset, a small collection of buildings situated on the corner of a plot split between animal enclosures and rice paddies. “No lights on in the house,” I say as Bima touches down. Rei nods absently and hops down before the rest of us, striding up to the door with unsteady hands. She calls out for her mother and father, but there’s no reply, and the door is jammed shut when she tries sliding it open.

“Let me,” Yun says, throwing a hard kick toward the door with an audible rush of air behind it. The whole sliding mechanism shears away from the wall, leaving the door itself toppled over with its rice paper center still intact. If anyone ever deserved those arrows…Rei lights a little fire in her hand, leading the way into the house.

“Anyone home?” Nanuq asks, calling out into the dark. Rei lights the sconces on the wall as we go along, although there isn’t much to see. Empty halls, empty rooms…an empty house shouldn’t have such a presence looming over it. Every little hair on the back of my neck is standing on end. “Smells like they got up and left in the middle of dinner. Maybe they’re out looking for your brother?”

“Kaji is not exactly the pride of my family,” Rei says. “If they—”

She slides open the door to the kitchen and stops dead in her tracks. Yun throws a hand over her mouth. “Oh, no…”

Rei’s parents are slumped over the damaged remains of their kitchen, half-full plates of food sitting on the dining table. Both their throats have deep, desperate claw marks cutting into the skin and blood drying around their fingernails, but their faces…their expressions are so twisted up I can hardly recognize them as human. The flame in Rei’s palm wavers and then blows out, dissipating into the darkness. I light my own and slip it over to a lamp on the table.

Nanuq runs over, water in hand as he drops to his knees to try and heal them, but Rei lays a hand on his shoulder. “Save your energy, they were poisoned,” she mumbles, pointing to her mother’s throat. “That was what we heard in the spirit world, him poisoning them. Coward.”

He steps away and gives her space to sink down, shaking and shuddering as she clutches at her mother. The air chills around us, and we can hear Rei choking back sobs. It’s Yun that responds first, stifling her gags and slowly padding over, unable to handle seeing someone in such pain. Rei gasps when Yun puts an arm around her, but after a moment she falls into the comfort, curling into the smallest ball she can manage. Nanuq and I rush over too, hugging her as tightly as the awkward arrangement will allow. We let her cry herself out for several minutes, let her take the pain into herself. Even Yun and I couldn’t be stony-faced if we stumbled across our parents like this.

Eventually her sobs give over to slow, ragged breaths. We ease back to give her some space, and then she springs to her feet in an instant before storming out into the hall. Without her there, we can hear the wind that’s kicked up outside, a fresh, vicious gust battering the house every few seconds. Rei comes back with a small glass bottle filled with a bit of dull white powder and some gnarled kava roots. “From his room,” she says, tossing it all onto the table. Her eyes are a bleary, shining mess of red. “Strychnine seed extract.”

“This isn’t looking good for the other people who went missing, is it?” Nanuq asks, fiddling with the cork of his water skin. “Wish we had a little more to go on.”

Rei’s voice is all venom, her rasp bringing it to a dangerous low. “Kaji is my twin. I can find him.”

Any hope of her elaborating falls away, and all we can do is follow in tense silence. Embers swirl brightly around her clenched fists, and more than once I swear I can see sparks crackling across her skin. There’s a bit of rain coming down outside, tossed about by the wind and splattering across our faces. Rei ignores it and trudges on, making a beeline for a large barn standing by the animal pens.

“Kaji would…would hide in here when our parents yelled at him,” she says, pulling on the doors. They refuse to budge. “Barred, from the inside. I need something firmer than air.”

I slam my foot into the ground and rip out a good length of earth, tightening it into a pillar to throw at the door. The whole barn trembles under a few well-placed strikes, and the bar on the other side of the door splinters soon enough. Rei doesn’t even wait for me to set the ram down before rushing in.

The house was unsettling, the barn even more so. Candles are already lit and arranged haphazardly around the main space, leaving the corners and long stretches of the walls in near-total darkness. I hope it’s only the half-butchered aurochs in the corner that’s responsible for the stench, and I have to pull the top of my vest up over my nose to take another step. Yun has the slightly cleverer idea of getting the flow of air going again.

Nanuq walks over to the nearest group of candles, three of them pressed so close together that they’ve fused, and looks around the room. “These form a circle,” he says, drawing a line with his finger to the next cluster and the ones beyond. “We do the same thing with whale oil candles sometimes. He turned this into a ritual space?”

Rei opens a package on an otherwise empty workbench, looks inside, and pulls out the contents with a frown before igniting them right there in her hand. Kava roots. “He would not have needed these, we can reach the spirit world on our own.”

“Maybe they weren’t for him,” I say, walking over while Yun goes to extinguish some candles sitting dangerously close to a ladder heading up to a loft space. One of the posts groaning to support it gives way, making the whole upper area fall to a tilt. _Thud, thud, thud_ —whatever was up there tumbles down along the new incline, and Yun doesn’t have time to get out of the way. One mass knocks her down, then another, and the gorge rises in my throat when they stop falling and I can see what they are. “Get her out of there!”

Rei and I pull the limp, bloodied forms of the missing townspeople aside as Nanuq yanks Yun free. She falls to all fours again almost immediately, trembling and retching until her lunch is on the floor. Her robes are freshly stained in all kinds of reds and browns, and even Nanuq bending all the blood away can’t remove the feeling of having been drenched in it. He sits her up after she’s stopped heaving, and all she can do is curl up and rub furiously at her face in a vain attempt to get clean. “Hey, it’s all right, you’re all right,” Nanuq says, rocking her slowly back and forth amidst her whimpers.

I kneel down beside her while Rei lays the bodies out more respectfully. She jumps when I run a hand through her hair, but leans into the touch all the same. “Deep breath, Yun. We’re right here, you’re okay. In…out. Come on, you’ll make yourself dizzy.”

She follows my lead after a bit more encouragement, and her trembling subsides by slow degrees. “Take her out by Bima, we’ll be there soon.”

Nanuq scoops her up and carries Yun out of the barn without a word of protest from her. Rei is saying something in Hitennese in front of the bodies, head bowed and fire burning low in her palms. “Prayers for the dead,” she explains when I go back to her. “May shoals of wind and flame carry you to the loving embrace of the sun. May you know again the peace torn from you.”

There are rope marks plainly visible on their wrists, to say nothing of the stab wounds through their clothes. Barely healed bludgeons on the sides of their heads, too. Skipping lunch is the only thing keeping me from being sick. “They deserve better than this.”

“We can build pyres for them after we deal with Kaji.”

 _Deal with._ Her voice is flat again, but with a tranquil kind of fury rather than her usual disinterest. “Pyres?”

She nods as she heads for the back of the barn, shoving past a few dented plows stacked up by the far wall. “We burn our dead.”

I suppose that makes sense, given how much land they have. Morbid, maybe. There’s been far too much of that today. Rei stops at a rickety hinged door at the back, where light is filtering through from the bottom and the sides. It’s jammed shut like the others. She doesn’t bother to ask for help again, and elects to torch the whole thing instead. Her flames spring out white and cool to a bright orange as they start to engulf the wood, adding the acrid stench of smoke to the already suffocating odor of the place. Without snuffing anything, Rei drives her heel hard between the hinges and sends the whole thing clattering to the ground. Stepping onto burning wood doesn’t seem to bother her as we go inside.

It looks to be a small, narrow area used to store extra tools, lined with all sorts of metal implements I vaguely remember from my parents’ farm. The disheveled boy clutching a long knife and muttering frantically to himself in the corner draws most of my attention, though.

“Quiet, it’s quiet, it’s quiet now…”

Rei got the looks in the family, clearly. Kaji’s hair hangs in thin, oily strands all around his head and face, where recent scabs and scratches mix with older, deeper pockmarks. I’ve had the same kind of break in my nose, but it looks like he never had it set properly or saw a healer afterward. His clothes are running threadbare in places and fraying outright in others, while his eyes can’t seem to focus on any one spot for more than a second or two.

“Kaji- _teisin_ ,” Rei says, kicking him hard in the leg to get his attention before slipping into more Hitennese. It’s only when she switches back to Chikyan for my benefit that he finally locks eyes with her. “Should I even bother hearing your defense? This is unforgivable, Kaji.”

“Rei…? Why are you here?”

“Because of all the people you killed!”

The wind outside kicks up again as she grabs him under the arms and hauls him to his feet. “He said they would all stop yelling at me,” Kaji mumbles, still holding the knife in a death grip. “Mother yells, Father yells, now you’re yelling too.”

“Who said that?” I ask, making him finally take notice of me. His gaze slips away after a moment with a grimace, as if he can’t bear to look at me. “Who said they’d stop the yelling?”

“He made me give them the kava, had to give it so the yelling would stop,” he says, banging his fists against the sides of his head. “It only stopped inside. It all stopped. The silence is terrible, Rei.”

He doesn’t seem to notice the blade of the knife knocking against his temple or the line of blood running down his neck. I’m not about to try and take it, not yet. “Kaji, you need to tell us what happened. Otherwise we can’t help you.”

“You can’t help me, Raava can’t help me,” he says, his voice rising. “He said you would come, said you would come from the temple and make them yell—”

Even with such a clumsy lunge, that knife can still do plenty of damage. I grab his wrist from below to try and knock it out of his hand, but his whole arm just _gives_ under the slightest bit of force, and half the blade disappears into the top of his neck.

I yank my hand away, as if that can undo the damage somehow. Kaji’s eyes go wide and he grabs uselessly at his neck, coughing and sputtering as blood drips from his mouth. Some of it hits my face. He turns to his sister when he starts falling to the ground, but Rei denies him that comfort and backs away as he crumples, seizing in a slowly growing pool of red.

“Rei, I didn’t—I didn’t mean—”

“He was a parricide, his life was forfeit already,” she says, stepping away to keep her boots clean. “I have real victims to prepare funerary rites for.”

“That’s it? That’s all you have to say?” It makes me feel like a rank hypocrite to challenge her reaction—she’s hardly the most expressive person, and I certainly wouldn’t shed any tears if I saw one of my brothers stabbed—but she hasn’t been afraid to get emotional today, and seeing her fall back into her usual deadened state so quickly is concerning.

“This is not the little brother I knew and loved. I have no tears to shed for whoever this is.”

We walk out in silence, only to find the massive shadow spirit staring us down at the barn doors. Nanuq’s gone and hidden Yun behind Bima, but it’s making no move to attack any of us. All it does is lean closer to me and Rei, like a dog taking in a new scent, and one cold tendril drifts over the blood on my face. Its gaze seems to move past us after a moment, to the row of bodies Rei laid out, and it fades as quickly as it appeared, taking with it the wind that had been howling only a few minutes ago.

⁂

The long day only gets longer. Rei insists on finding the families of all the victims and breaking the news personally, and then there’s the matter of bringing the bodies to the temple, all before explaining every sordid detail to the other sages. She won’t let us help build the pyres. We don’t know the proper way to stack the wood, she says. The guilt in her voice is too thick for any of us to believe that.

It’s well past midnight when I shuffle out of the temple to my temporarily repurposed training grounds, where Rei is sitting by her rock in front of eight unlit pyres. Her raspy hummed dirge is hard to hear until I get closer, and by then she notices my presence and falls silent. “I thought you might’ve started by now.”

“We light the pyres at dawn so that their spirits can rise with the sun. I will sit vigil with them until then. Was there something else you needed?”

I sit down beside her and pull my legs up into a lotus position. “Just wanted to make sure you were okay, you’ve had an even longer day than me. Plus, with your family…”

Her resolve wavers for a brief moment, and then she takes a long, shuddering breath. “I had not seen Kaji in almost a year, my parents even longer than that. There was no relationship with any of them, I was simply another sage for the island. I will grieve my parents along with the rest of the victims.”

“There are only eight pyres here, what about your brother?”

“Weighted and dropped from a boat into the bay. Murderers are consigned to the deep.”

I’m sure Nanuq would find that interesting, but it’s not the time for cultural comparisons. Rei slumps a bit and lets a frown play on her lips. “Kyoshi, please…tell me we did the right thing.”

“We didn’t have a choice.”

She closes her eyes and bows her head. “That is not the same.”

“Yonheng called you the ‘first bridge,’ what did he mean by that?” I ask, trying to lead her into another subject. “Seemed like you already knew what he was talking about.”

Rei nods slowly. “You are a bridge between the human and spirit worlds. Just not the only one.” She pulls a few blades of grass from the ground in front of her. “Kaji and I were born at dawn on the summer solstice, on a day when several heavenly bodies stood in alignment. The barrier between the worlds was weak, and we gained a sensitivity to spirits not unlike the kind the Avatar spirit provides you, but we lacked the protection from them that being the Avatar provides. Strong emotions can make us…vulnerable to them. I was born first—the first bridge—and Kaji followed a few minutes after. You would be the third, and none of the spirits I have asked could tell me of any others.”

“That’s why you stay…I’ll say ‘calm.’”

“Yes. I do not want spirits in my ear at all hours.”

I knew being the Avatar would involve a lot of figuring things out as I go along, but this is a lot to take in all at once. “Do you think that’s what happened to Kaji?”

“Perhaps. I have no doubt he was involved with that snake spirit, but we can question neither, and we could drive ourselves mad trying to puzzle out their motives ourselves. Regardless, he was not above the law, and would have been executed if the families of the victims did not get to him first,” she says, straightening back up. “This is not a conversation to have so late, you should get some sleep. Go be with Yun. She could do with some comfort after her ordeal.”

“Did you just suggest what I think you suggested?”

She looks over at me with something that might’ve become a smile, given more time. “I expect hard work from you, I do not begrudge you your recreation. Go, I will be here for a while yet. And Kyoshi…thank you.”

“I thought I’d be the last person you’d be thanking, after today,” I say as I get to my feet.

“You kept me from having to commit fratricide.”

The feeling of Kaji’s blood splattering across my face sends a chill down my spine. She really would have killed her own brother…well. I know where she’s coming from. Rei stands up and wraps me in an awkward, tired hug, which I’m happy to return with a light kiss to the top of her head. “Goodnight, Kyoshi.”

The temple is quiet and still as I make my way upstairs, the remaining villagers having been moved back to other, still standing homes in Shinden. Nanuq is slipping out of my room when I get to our floor, already in his nightclothes, and we nearly bump into each other in the dim light. “Oh, there you are. Yun latched onto me once I finally got her to sleep. Think she might prefer you, though.”

“In a minute, I wanted to talk to you about today.”

He leans against the railing overlooking the floor below us. “About trading some of our mortality, or the conversation we didn’t get to have?”

“The mortality thing.” It seems like the easier topic, perversely enough.

“I knew when I decided to stick with you that things might get crazy,” Nanuq says. “Just a hazard of being around the Avatar, I guess. But it’s over and done with…for better or worse, everything worked out, not much use complaining or second-guessing now. It’s not like you made our lifespans shorter.”

“That’s remarkably level-headed of you.”

“Tiaraq’s the hothead, I try to go with the flow. And the other thing?” he asks, turning to me. Oh, Nanuq…I lay a hand over his and thread our fingers together as he shuffles closer to me. He answers his own question when I can’t give him a response. “Yun needs to be here for this and she’s still too shaken up right now.”

“Exactly. I want to get this settled, I think you know that I care for you—but it’s not the time.”

He nods, but his shoulders slump all the same. “I understand. Think I’ll get some sleep, then. See you in the morning?”

“You don’t have to go,” I say, blurting it out before I can think better of it. He stops easing away from my grasp.

“Are you familiar with the idea of mixed messages, Avatar Kyoshi?” he asks with a playfulness to his tone.

“I—you’re right, I’m sorry. Forget I said anything.” One of these days I’ll need to learn when to stop talking.

“You turn all red when you’re flustered,” Nanuq says, squeezing my hand. “I’ll stay, if you want me to. Should I wait out here while you change?”

“No, you can come in.”

Despite my permission, he hesitates on the threshold until I take his hand again and lead him inside. His heart’s probably thumping worse than mine. Nanuq sits on the foot of the bed while I shrug out of my vest and wraps, and I can feel his gaze travelling across my body in the low lamplight when I throw my pants over the wardrobe. I’ve changed in front of men before, but now it’s because I want to, and I swish my hips a little more than strictly necessary as I pull on my nightclothes. He has the courtesy to look away when I turn around, fooling neither of us, and he doesn’t say anything about the little show.

Yun’s arms clamp around me as soon as I lay down next to her, before I even have a chance to get under the sheets. It’s too hot for that, anyway. I pat the empty space behind me and Nanuq shifts over to fill it, his weight pressing comfortably, reassuringly, on my back. His breath is uneven at first, but it levels out after a few moments and travels in warm lines along my neck. He mumbles an embarrassed apology and tries to turn over when his cock starts to stiffen up between my thighs, but I hold him in place. This is…this is good. There are a few sweet minutes of falling asleep with both of them nestled against me, safe and secure, and I can almost forget about the day, about being the Avatar.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Nanuq, Kyoshi and Yun, art by [AATKAW](aatkaw.tumblr.com)) 


	21. Summons

“Don’t you dare stop…”

Nanuq likes being defiant, and looks up at me with a challenging glance as he draws his mouth away, kissing along the flushed skin of my thighs just as I’m getting close. I groan and thread a hand through his hair, pulling enough to elicit a hiss and guiding him back up. My hips roll into his tongue and that gets the fire going again, blazing up with every little motion he makes. “Come on, like you’re hungry,” I whisper, my voice tight and strangled, nearly breaking when he hits home. A hot jolt shoots up through my belly, and I can’t bear it any longer. My fingers tighten in his hair as the arch in my back drops out, and I don’t much care about being modest now. I shake, I scream, I pull him up into a frantic kiss and push up when his cock presses on my stomach. He seems to grasp what I want—such a fast learner, this boy—and lines up with me, pressing as lightly as he can—

My eyes flash open, and I have to roll over before I smother on my pillow. Fire Nation winter mornings are comfortably cool, but I’m sweating all the same. Most of it is sweat anyway, the insides of my thighs are wet for another reason. Still, better than a nightmare…Yun’s still asleep on my left with an arm draped across me, but Nanuq’s already gone, back to his own room or down to breakfast. I let my head fall against my pillow and work a few stray strands of hair from my mouth.

Yun doesn’t seem to mind our new arrangement, or at least she hasn’t said anything. The bed’s more than big enough for the three of us, anyway. Some nights it makes me feel a little disingenuous, backing my hips into his in a slow rhythm while he moves in tentative counter, but it’s just sleep. Ugh, I can’t even convince myself. I can beat people up just fine, but a conversation with a sweet tiny girl makes me stall for three months. Okay, Kyoshi. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

“Morning,” Yun says, curling against my side. Her hand lingers over my stomach, and I get an appreciative little sound from her when I tense up to give her a bit more definition to play with.

I draw small circles with my thumb on the nape of her neck until she shifts up enough for me to plant a kiss on her forehead. “Morning.”

“Good dream?”

One of my best by far. Too bad I can’t say a word about it. We take a moment to untangle our legs without getting out from under the covers. “What makes you say that?”

“The moaning, and the fact that the sheets are sticky,” she teases, a sleepy grin growing on her lips. “So? How was it?”

“Not bad,” I say, running my fingers along the ridge of her arching back. The way she presses into me stokes that tiny flame in my belly. “How about we see if the waking world can compare?”

Her breath is quick and ragged on my throat. As good as the dream was, real life will be better. Yun yelps as I pick her up and set her on top of me, glaring with the same mock indignation I always see when I handle her, and our legs tangle hopelessly again as we work the sheets off of us. She’s sure to wrap herself around me, strong and needful, all while kissing along my neck.

I start to roll her over, but Yun plants her knee against the bed to keep us in place. “Maybe I’ll take the lead today?” she asks, sitting up to give me a better view as she pulls off her nightshirt. The little mess of blood vessels on her side is still here, faded but still visible. “You’re always so in control of things and…attentive to me.”

“I could be selfish, if you prefer.” She whacks playfully at my side, and I take off my shirt and spread my arms in contrition. “I’m yours to toy with, do whatever you like.”

“Oh, the Avatar at my mercy, I like that.” Yun leans down again and nips at my collarbone, my breasts, all over my stomach…finally she moves on, pulling off my pants and hovering expectantly over me, looking back up with a lopsided grin. I want to push her head down, if only take the edge off the arousal tightening there, but she’s in charge this time.

“Yun,” I mumble, rolling my hips only for her to keep her mouth maddeningly out of reach. “Please…”

The reward for my courtesy is a long, firm swipe of her tongue that threatens to reduce me to incoherence right then and there. So much better than a dream. Fire licks all up and down my core as she feels me out, teasing at each inch of skin, testing, trying to send me into a frenzy. Whatever early morning haziness I had is gone, replaced by simple rising, pressing need. “Fuck, Yun!”

I don’t care who’s in charge, I thread my hands through her hair and push her down harder, hiking up my hips as she moans. Oh, her tongue…all the tightness starts knotting up and twisting over itself, snaking down to my legs and up into my chest, forcing out all kinds of twitches and little whimpers as I try to stay sane.

She knows me too well. Every time I get close, Yun relaxes her tongue and looks up at me, taunting. The way she draws back is almost painful in its absence, leaving me bitterly incomplete. My toes curl, and cracks start forming in one of the earthenware pots in the corner. I swear I can see her grinning at that. The heat mounts in my core, blotting out everything else, and makes me break out in a sweat all over. I can’t bear to arch my back any longer and I give in, going limp on the bed where I have a perfect view of the door. Some part of me wants to be interrupted in the middle of it all, to have Nanuq walk back in and see me while I’m—

Finally it hits me like a cresting wave, a huge wall of pleasure flooding out from my core and all through my whole oversensitized body. All the tension I was holding just _snaps_ , and my body relaxes in between the tremors seizing at me. I can’t get any words out. My mouth opens and closes, but all I can manage is a tearful gasp while Yun eases back and wipes her mouth clean. I reach down and pull her on top of me again, drawing a deep, demanding kiss out of her. My taste is still fresh on her lips, so starkly different from hers. I don’t mind it, but I don’t particularly enjoy it, either.

“So?” she asks when I release her. “Better than a dream?”

I need a few more minutes to collect myself, and I simply stroke along the middle of her bare back until I’m cogent again. “Much better. Now let’s see what I can do for you.”

“Oh no. You stay right there,” Yun says, doing her best to impart an edge to her voice as she tosses her pants across the room. “Flex a little.”

Well, she’s in charge. She sits up again and swings a leg over me so that she’s straddling my stomach, her skin pressed flush against mine. Her hands squeeze at my thighs, and her legs tighten around my hips as she starts to rock back and forth. A low moan fills the room, and a bit of slickness shines on my abdomen. She’s getting off on me? Oh, the warmth coming off her…I can see a tiny bead of sweat running down the middle of her tummy. Yun bites her lip and adds some side to side motion to her rhythm, her grip tightening so she can keep herself upright. “Kyoshi …”

I prop myself up on my elbow and run my free hand up along her thigh, letting my thumb reach up to the stiff pink point of her clit and rub slow circles in time with her motion. The color rises in her cheeks when I apply the barest bit of pressure or flick my thumb, and her lips part in a strangled whimper. Yun’s putting on a wonderful show, a vision in the morning light with a thin sheen of sweat all over her small, trembling body.

“You’re so beautiful,” I say, my voice almost lost in the shuffle. “My sweet little Yun.”

“All yours— _ah_!”

Her pace picks up along with the sounds escaping her, and she loses whatever rhythm she had to animal desire. I tense up my stomach again to give her a better surface to work with, and that puts her over the edge. The tips of her nails dig hard into my legs as she unravels, and then the pressure on my hips disappears. Yun slumps forward, working through unsteady breaths, and finally falls down beside me, bliss written in her eyes. “Kyoshi, you…wow.”

“I really didn’t do much,” I say, moving my arm so she can rest her head on my shoulder. “Nice change of pace, even if I have to wash up.”

My free hand taps at my stomach, where her arousal is smeared all over my skin. Yun blushes and curls closer to me. “Was that something you made up, or have you tried it before?”

“Li didn’t really have the physique to pull it off, and you’re the only other person I’ve been with,” Yun says, draping her arm over my chest.

“Oh, you only like me for my muscles, I see.” Her hand flies toward my head, but only finds the pillow. Hmm. “Tell me about her.”

“She was my best friend,” Yun says, tracing idle circles around my breast. “I loved her before I even had a word for it. She was smart and funny and graceful…we were in all the same classes, and when we had chores we’d sneak up to the roof instead and watch the baby bison learn to fly.”

“Hard to imagine anything Bima’s size was ever a baby.”

“I think I told you how we went into the town after we passed a test? We had way too much sake and she pinned me against the wall of a stable and kissed me, hard,” she says in an almost reverent whisper.

“Mmhmm.”

“And I liked it, I liked it so much, Kyoshi. I spent so many years worrying that I was broken somehow because I wasn’t interested in the boys in town like the others, but suddenly everything I’d learned about the heart chakra made sense, so I kissed her back. We actually woke up in that stable. Trying to land Bima quietly at the temple in the morning wasn’t easy.”

“How devious,” I say, twirling a lock of her hair between my fingers. It’s getting long again, she’ll probably cut it soon. “I can only imagine what that was like.”

Yun raises an eyebrow and watches the uneven rise and fall of my chest for a moment. “What is it? Do you like the idea of me with other women?”

“And what if I do?” I ask, drawing a finger slowly along her cheek. She shudders and lays one leg over mine. “You’re much too sweet to keep you all to myself.”

“Kyoshi…”

There’s a single knock at the door, and Rei pushes it open without waiting for a reply. Yun yelps and rolls off of me before grabbing the sheets to cover herself, while I prop myself up on my elbows with the most annoyed look I can muster mid-afterglow. This isn’t exactly the interruption I wanted. A little color rises in her cheeks as we stare at each other for a long, silent moment. “Is this a bad time—”

“Yes!”

“You have letters,” she says, and shuts the door again. I really have to get a lock.

A thoroughly red-faced Yun stops pulling the covers around her body and glares at the door. “I’m going to blast her off her feet if she does that again, I swear.”

“I don’t think she meant anything by it. Come on, we ought to get up anyway. Can’t spend all morning in bed.”

“Can’t we?”

Her hand falls on my arm, not so subtly squeezing, and I’m almost ready to rise to her taunt…no, no. “Easy, you temptress. I have to at least see who’s sending me messages. Who would even know I’m here?”

Eventually we manage to separate ourselves and get ready for the day. Yun’s room is all but empty by now, and my wardrobe is split between my clothes and hers. I pull on my usual kimono and head downstairs, where Rei is talking with Saburou, one of the other sages who’s been teaching me Hitennese. He bows slightly, making his silly pointed hat droop a bit, while Rei knows better than to believe I’d appreciate such a courtesy from her. “Good morning,” I say as Yun takes the stairs three at a time behind me. She bumps into my side and sticks her tongue out at Rei, who rolls her eyes. “You said I had messages?”

“A summons and a writ of attainder, Your Holiness,” Saburou says. The other sages insist on titles no matter how many times I ask them to just call me Kyoshi.

Rei holds out one letter, its broken seal bearing the mark of the Fire Nation Imperial Court. I’d object to them reading my letters now that I can stumble through the language, but the script on this is so overly formalized that I can barely make out my own name at the top. “I don’t know what a writ of attainder is.”

“It declares my brother outside the law after the fact,” Rei says. “Murderer or not, you broke the law by killing a citizen of Hitenno. This absolves you of that crime, given the circumstances.”

Some nights I can still feel the warm splatter of his blood across my face. I shake my head clear. “The circumstances being all those innocent people?”

She nods and holds out the second letter, a nicer piece of parchment folded into a hexagon with gold wax sealing it. “The law is the law, even for Avatars. And this is an invitation to the capital, written by Fire Lord Muryo herself.” This letter’s script is noticeably shakier, and there are small blots of ink where it looks like the brush paused mid-stroke. “Her Imperial Majesty requests the honor of your presence at the celebration of the new year next month.”

“The Earth Sages have also again requested—demanded, rather—your appearance at the White Jade Spire in Omashu to formally confirm your accession,” Saburou says. “As the latest Earth Kingdom Avatar, they consider your continued absence insulting.”

“No one makes demands of me.” They want to traipse into my life with orders and commands while they did nothing to find me all those months I spent without a home…they can sit in their little tower and seethe, for all I care. “Rei, was this an invitation or an order?”

“The request was respectfully deferent. Her Majesty does little ordering.”

Good enough for me. “And how far is it to the capital from here?”

“Two weeks overland, one by boat with favorable winds,” she says, her gaze falling on Yun. “Perhaps faster by flying bison. If you wish to attend, you should leave soon to arrive in time to observe all the political niceties.”

“What are we attending?” Nanuq asks, strolling in from the dining room with half a spring roll.

“The Fire Lord invited me to the new year’s celebrations.”

He nods, but his usual grin is tempered, and he stands up a little straighter as if a metal rod’s been forced along his back. “Some of our healers have been to Kasai—they can make good money in the other nations—and most of them agreed with Rei’s ‘viper pit’ comparison. Are you sure you know enough Hitennese to get by? Because Yun and I know even less than you.”

That’s true enough, and if their writing looks that different, their speech is probably a different dialect. Too many unknowns for someone who’s hardly conversational. “Rei, would the other sages mind if I took you with us?”

“I would not dream of staying behind. Someone needs to keep you from making a fool of yourself.”

Saburou looks at her, scandalized that she would act so familiar with me, but doesn’t reprimand her once he sees me smile. Rei might be the most junior Fire Sage, both at the temple and in general, but they all defer to her when it comes to me. “I’ll make the arrangements with the head sage,” he says, and heads for the stairs.

“ _Dhanyava,_ Saburou- _seji_ ,” Rei says as she leaves. “We should pack, then. Food and supplies can be ready by first light. Shall I have Kiku charter a boat?”

Yun shakes her head. “We can take Bima, all I need is a map.”

“Very well, but know this, all of you. For whatever grandeur the palace might hold, Kasai _is_ a den of vipers, with a lie in every word and a knife behind every grin. Not everyone in Hitenno is as nice as me.”

She gives us the flattest, dullest grin imaginable, the kind that doesn’t reach all the way up to her eyes, and I refuse to believe it isn’t an awkward stab at humor. “I have a meditation group for the children from town to lead, you may have the rest of the morning to do with as you wish.”

Rei retreats to the reflecting pool chamber to prepare for her class, leaving the three of us alone. For all the time we spend sleeping beside one another, it gets remarkably awkward in short order. “Guess I’ll get packing,” Nanuq says, stuffing the rest of the spring roll in his mouth. None of us have very much to take, but it’ll be better than scrambling in the morning. We all go back upstairs, and Nanuq takes a step past his room while following us before pausing and turning back.

“I know Rei’s getting better, but she’s still so weird sometimes,” Yun says, looking through the drawers she’s claimed for herself. “Hmm…Fire Nation clothes? Might show too much skin for a formal occasion, plus it’s winter. Then again, it probably won’t be any colder there than it is here. My regular robes? I’m not going as a representative of Tochi, I don’t want to send the wrong message…what are you bringing, Kyoshi? Kyoshi?”

She turns back to where I’m sitting, on the side of the bed. I pat the empty space next to me. “Sit with me for a minute, Yun. I have to talk to you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is either going to go really well or really badly.
> 
> So Hitennese isn't entirely Japanese ("dhanyava(ad)" means "thank you" in Hindi) but it does possess its own set of honorifics, so I imagined the comparison would come up anyway. "-seji" is an informal honorific used when addressing a fellow sage (but not when addressing a sage of higher rank; then the more respectful "-sejimasitou" would be appropriate). Similarly, Rei's use of "-teisin" in the previous chapter is the formal (and tellingly, unfamiliar) way to refer to family of one's own generation. The Avatar also gets their own unique honorific, "-touin." The full list is [here](https://docs.google.com/document/d/13PNMQhZs0UH6xTwoPjtFuV9ZwMU3UU6RR1erSlGx3GM/edit?usp=sharing).
> 
> But I'm rambling now, don't let that distract you from the story.


	22. Arrangements

Well, I’ve said it, now I have to do it. Some small part of me is hoping for another interruption, another disaster to throw myself into, but Shinden and the other villages on the island remain quiet and in no need of saving. Damn them. Yun comes over to the bed and sits beside me, turning my way while I stare at the floor. I never noticed how intricate the tilework is. She lays a hand over mine and squeezes lightly. “What is it, Kyoshi?”

Okay. Okay, I can do this. Letting it draw on is insulting to all three of us. What’s the worst that can happen? Yun could leave me, Nanuq could’ve lost interest, their friendship gets destroyed…I shake my head clear. “You know how Nanuq’s been sleeping in here with us?”

Her nod is slow and measured. “It’d be hard not to notice, he’s right on the other side of you. Some nights I overreach and wake up holding onto his shirt.”

“Right, right.” Deep breath, Kyoshi. I’ve got to do this quickly before I lose my nerve. “And…you don’t mind that?”

“Should I?” she asks, cocking an eyebrow. “I know we never talked about it, but this is your room, you could drag Rei in here if you really wanted—but please don’t. Besides, it’s not like I can sleep on both sides of you, and you’re too big to keep in place all by myself.”

She smiles a bit and nudges me in the arm. At least she’s in a good mood. Please let that last. “The reason I asked him to stay in here at night is because I…I have feelings for both of you,” I blurt out before snapping my mouth shut.

I’ve been hit badly before, hit so hard I saw nothing but black spots and blood. Yun looks much the same way when I force myself to turn to her. She draws her hand away and becomes very interested in her lap, rubbing the hem of her robes so roughly it looks like it might fray.

“Oh.”

I want to reach over to her, lay a comforting arm across her shoulders, but I stop myself and give her space. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner, this isn’t easy to bring up.”

“You should try being in my position,” she mumbles, wringing her hands. “Some part of me knew that might’ve been the case, I just didn’t want to think about it. Have you, I mean, have you two…”

“No! No, no. He only sleeps in here. I’ve never even kissed him.”

“But you want to.”

She’s not going to let me talk around anything, clearly. I owe her honesty at the very least. “Yes.”

There’s a long moment of heavy silence where we both try to steady ourselves, letting the word hang between us. Yun’s eyes are wet and shining, and she puts a hand over her mouth every so often, as if she’s keeping herself from being ill. “Am I not enough for you?” she asks, her voice thick.

She doesn’t offer any resistance when I wrap my arms around her, but she doesn’t lean into my embrace, either. “Yun, you’re wonderful, it’s not about being enough or not enough. You were the first person who ever wanted to be my friend and I’ll never forget that. I love you.”

A weak smile creeps over her lips, but it fades quickly. “I wondered what it would be like when you first told me that,” she says, then adds quietly, “I love you, too.”

Yun relaxes into my hug by small degrees and puts her arms at my sides without squeezing. “I don’t want to ruin what we have. Your approval is what matters here. Nothing happens if you say no.”

“And if I say I don’t ever want to share you?” Yun asks, looking up at me. “I know you’re the Avatar and I’m doing that with the whole world already, but if I don’t ever want to share you like this?”

My heart sinks a little, and my ears are definitely burning. I had been prepared for this answer, but it doesn’t sting any less for the anticipation. Maybe I was too optimistic. “Okay,” I tell her, rubbing along her back. “Okay. No sharing.”

“That’s not what I said, I want you to be happy and I don’t want you to resent me, it’s just…this is a lot to process,” she says, and a spark shoots through my chest. “Shouldn’t Nanuq be here for this?”

“I thought about that, but I didn’t want you to feel like we were ganging up on you. You had to feel free to answer how you really wanted to. And I could never resent you, I know I’m putting a lot on you right now.”

“Well, thank you.” Yun finally hugs me back for a moment, and then reaches back to wipe her eyes dry. “I guess I got used to having you all to myself. Sometimes I forget you like men, too. And how would something like this even work? Separate time alone with you? As a group? I’m really not interested in having sex with Nanuq, I like him, he’s a good friend, but he has a little too much…penis for my taste.”

“This’d be about me and him, I’d make that clear,” I say, running a hand through her hair. “I know you only like women, you wouldn’t ever have to do anything you don’t want to. But you’re asking about details, what’s that mean?”

She rolls a few beads of her pendant, one of her little nervous habits. “It means there would be a lot of them to figure out, and I want an idea of what I’m deciding on before I do it. But…this is something that would make you happy?”

“I’d like to find out,” I say quietly, trying so hard not to pressure her. “If it ends up not working for any of us, we’d sit down and figure out what does. But losing you isn’t worth this.”

Yun drums her fingers along her knee and furrows her brow. She’s silent for a long moment, and several times she seems to be on the verge of saying something, but always stops herself before falling back into contemplation. It must be what I looked like every time I wavered about bringing this up in the first place. Finally, she looks at me and takes my hand again, lacing her fingers up with mine.

“We can try it.”

She seems to sit up a littler straighter once she’s said it, and we both breathe a sigh of relief. I would’ve respected whatever decision she made, but…I’m glad it went this way. “Thank you,” I whisper, leaning forward so I can kiss her. She kisses back eagerly and lets me pin her down on the sheets with her hands over her head, arching her back as I press down on her. “Thank you, Yun. This means so much to me.”

“Just don’t forget what a woman’s touch feels like,” she says, pulling the sash of my kimono loose and letting it fall open.

It’s slow and deliberate, every moment carefully chosen as opposed to our frantic morning. We’re both still a little worn out, I’m sure. Each lash of her tongue, every line her fingers trace across my body…it’s all to burn her into my mind, as if I could ever forget her.

“This seems familiar,” she says, playing with my sleeve. We never even managed to disrobe. “Now all we need is for Rei to barge in.”

“Don’t tempt fate.”

“So how long have you wanted to have this talk?” Yun asks. “It seems like this has been building up for a while.”

I shift around so I’m not laying on my hair and pulling on it. Maybe Yun’s short cut has some merit. “The first day I wanted to do this, that shadow spirit attacked Shinden. Rei was going on about shame and the fire chakra. We were all rattled after that day, I didn’t want to throw all of this at you. Then I got caught up in learning Hitennese and my bending lessons.”

She nods and plants a light kiss on my throat. “Okay. I’m going to finish packing, you ought to go talk to Nanuq. I’ll lay your things out, too.”

“Thank you.”

We’re slow in rolling off the bed, and I take my time redoing my kimono while Yun goes through our wardrobe. “Oh, I’ll just take everything, Bima won’t mind,” she says before pausing and looking back at me. “Do you two want some privacy tonight, or…?”

She presses in when I get up and hug her from behind. “We won’t be doing anything like that soon. This is your bed too, I’d never ask you to leave.”

“Okay, okay.”

I ruffle her hair once more and slip out of my room. We were in there for an hour or so, and the temple is in its usual midday lull. A few townspeople are lighting votive candles at the statues on the second floor, and I can feel a handful of people in the library upstairs. I hope we weren’t too loud. Nanuq is in the antechamber, arcing some water over Rei’s head to the amusement of the little crowd of children sitting near her.

“See, there are a lot of similar movements,” he says, tightening one hand into a fist to make the water ripple in place. The children _ooh_ and _ahh_ , but Rei only rolls her eyes.

“I beg to differ…ritual firebending is a dance of grace and subtle beauties, a bright song extoling the energy of life and the beauty of the sun.” She demonstrates by igniting white flames in her palms and drawing her hands in a quick circle, making the fire appear as a continuous stream in front of her. “Ritual waterbending is workaday and utilitarian.”

“That’s cultural bias talking.”

“Mine, or yours?”

Nanuq shakes his head and looks over at me. “Why don’t we ask the woman who can do both? Kyoshi, do you think waterbending or firebending is more—”

They don’t get to continue their cultural posturing before I lean down, press my hands to his cheeks and kiss him, hard. His lips are a little salty and moist, a far cry from Yun’s overall plainness, but not without its own appeal. A little bit of his stubble brushes on my chin as he cranes his head up to meet me. All the water he was holding up splashes down on Rei, but I barely hear her gasp or the children laughing as I grab Nanuq around the waist and pick him up so I can kiss him without tweaking my neck. We break away, gasping for breath, but I keep him held against me and dangling off the ground. “Good talk?” he asks, panting.

“Very good talk.”

Rei clears her throat to get our attention and stares daggers at us, water rising off her soaked hair and clothes as steam. “You dumped that water rather prematurely.”

“Oh, sorry.” I let Nanuq out of my grip so he can bend her dry. “I got distracted.”

“So it would seem.”

She ushers the children away, and Nanuq cleans up the rest of the water before we go and sit on the stairs. “So it went well?” he asks, threading his hand up with mine.

“Yun’s willing to give it a try, as long as I make it clear that this is just between you and me,” I tell him as he nuzzles against my shoulder. “She values your friendship, but she’s not interested in men that way.”

He nods, and I run my thumb over his palm. “And I should tell you, I’m not sure how fast I can go with this,” I say. “I don’t…I don’t have the best experience with men.”

“We’ll do things at your pace.”

He reaches up for a chaste little peck on my cheek. “You might regret saying that, I knew Yun for a year before I even kissed her.”

“I’m sure she would tell me you’re worth the wait.”

There are more details to pin down, things to discuss, but I have one last language lesson to get in before we leave in the morning. Saburou doesn’t make his frustration overt—all the sages other than Rei are intent on formality—but calling me distracted would be a serious understatement. I only snap out of my haze when we go back to my room for the night and find Yun there, reading over a scroll from the library. Some of the awkwardness of the situation starts to hit, but Yun just smiles and pulls us both onto the bed.

⁂

It’s morning in an academic sense, and only an academic sense, when I wake up, pressed from both sides into the middle of the bed with my pillow. There might be light outside, but sunrise is not morning no matter how many firebenders insist otherwise. Either way, I don’t feel anyone shuffling about on the upper levels or the stairs, so Rei isn’t about to burst in and hurry us through our final preparations. That means I get a few more minutes of a bed, which is so much better than trying to sleep in a saddle.

That doesn’t last long. Yun’s an early riser for some wretched reason and sits up out of habit, leaving me to stop myself from rolling forward. There’s a pleasant stiffness against my thighs that I’d rather not pull away from so soon, and I stay in bed. She hops up and goes over to the wardrobe after some stretching to don her robes. “I know you’re awake, Kyoshi. Your breathing changes.”

“Five more minutes.”

“Oh, get up, you can sleep on Bima.”

“You’re awfully excited to get going,” I mumble, tapping Nanuq’s leg until he stirs. His hips jerk forward as he wakes up and I get a little poke for my trouble.

“Well, I’ve always wanted to see a big city like that. Temples and villages are nice, but there are so many stories about places like Ba Sing Se and Kasai. Aren’t you interested to see what the capital is like?”

“I’m a simple woman, Yun.”

No sooner has she coaxed us out of bed than Rei wanders in without waiting for anyone to answer her soft rap on the door. I can’t be annoyed until I’m not so groggy. “You have clothes on today, I see.”

Too early for sarcasm. I pull off my nightshirt and throw it at her. “They’d better have locks in Kasai.”

She strolls further in, folding my shirt as she walks, and places it gently on the wardrobe. “The supplies should all be loaded within the hour. And if this is your way of trying to complete your set, you should know I require a more subtle seduction. Try poetry.”

I only get her snipe once she’s left the room, and thankfully she doesn’t see my face go red. Nanuq does though, and it makes him grin. “Well, she’s got you there.”

“She does not! You two pursued me!”

That gets them both laughing, dissolving some of the tension of the new arrangement. I’ll be glad when we can all get back to being comfortable with each other, but this is a good start, even if it’s at my expense.

The other sages aren’t awake by the time we get downstairs, and only Rei and Kiku are sitting in the dining room, speaking in quick, clipped Hitennese in between sips of tea. Three small packages are on the table beside Rei. “Ready?” she asks, still looking at the steam rising from her cup.

I’ve got my bedroll, I’m as ready as I’ll ever be. “We’ll bring her back in one piece, Kiku,” I say through a yawn.

She finishes her tea and nods, watching Rei with a look not even the blind could mistake for innocent. “Please do. She really livens up the temple.”

Well, now I need to hear what Rei’s done to warrant that kind of praise, but she stands up and presses a package into each of our hands before I can follow up on it. “Please keep these in your bags for the time being, spirits know how jealously this fabric holds a stain.”

Yun gasps when she opens her bundle and unfolds its contents, a silky saffron kimono with bright scarlet trimmings. Nanuq’s is mostly navy blue with sharply contrasting crimson on the hems in a slightly different cut, broader in the shoulders and tighter in the chest. Mine is, somewhat predictably, a deep green, with a complex silver filigree sewn into the red parts at the hems. Upon a closer look I can see that it’s heraldry, with the crest of the Earth Kingdom slightly larger than that of the other nations.

“An appearance at the palace required something of a finer cut than your usual clothes,” Rei says before Yun and Nanuq hug her. “Ah—enough of that, we should have left half an hour ago.” No matter how much she complains, I notice she never seems to try and get out of any embrace.

Kiku slips a tiny scroll into her palm as we shuffle out, and Bima doesn’t look any happier than me at having been woken up so early. She begrudgingly lists to her side so we can climb into the saddle, where a few crates have been tied down. Yun pats Bima’s head rather than cracking the reins, and we lurch into the air.

“Follow the wind for now, due west,” Rei says. “Kasai should be no more than a few days away.”

She pulls out the little scroll she was given as Yun makes some minor corrections to our course, reads it, and smiles. It’s not the wry little suggestion of a grin she uses with us, but a real smile that reaches up to her eyes. “What do you have there?” I ask once I finish laying out my bedroll.

Rei tempers her smile when she realizes I’m looking at her and hands it to me. “Like I said. Try poetry.”

_Spotted flame-lily_  
_Standing stiffly in the wind_  
_Twists, turns and bends its way home_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Glad that worked out...for now...
> 
> As much as I'd like to use haiku for their poetry, simply because it's the form most commonly identified with Japan, we're about two centuries off in my timeline from that being a widely used form (this point in the story, when Kyoshi is 19, is roughly equivalent to 1471 CE). And Kyoshi-era Fire Nation is essentially Heian (9th-12th centuries CE) rather than Muromachi (14th-16th centuries CE) anyway. What we see here is a somewhat outdated form of [_waka_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waka_\(poetry\)) called _katauta_ , a 5-7-7 form meant to comprise half of an exchange between two people. Rei, presumably, already gave her half to Kiku off-screen, and what we see at the end of the chapter is Kiku's response. I've toned down the general ~~obtuseness~~ erudition of their poetry, so hopefully the meaning here is...obvious. ~~So much gay~~


	23. An Avatar of the People

Hanshu, the Fire Nation mainland, is three days by bison. I never realized how massive Baihe was until we had to fly across the length of it, and now I know exactly how easterly Shinden and the Shudan Temple really are. Rei’s brought several scrolls written in a style of Hitennese too formal for me to read, and between that and her meditating she’s able to while away the hours. Yun does most of the flying, so almost all of my time—and there’s a staggering amount of it—involves tossing a handful of water back and forth or letting Nanuq teach me some silly board game with a bunch of tiny circular pieces.

“I thought you couldn’t move them like that,” I say, pointing to a blue piece he used to jump two spaces forward and one to the left, right over a few of my pieces.

“Water tiles can move this way, it’s the earth tiles that have to move one at a time. The fire tiles can go straight up and down or side to side.”

“And the air tiles?”

“Diagonally for any length,” Rei says, cracking one eye to examine our board. One of her eyebrows hikes up the tiniest bit. “That was a terrible gambit to play under Southern Water Tribe rules, Kyoshi. Arranging your lotus pieces in the southern corner would have been wiser.”

“Yeah, well, it’s only my second game and Nanuq won’t explain all the rules at once.”

“It’s better if you learn this way!” he insists, although I have a sneaking suspicion that he wants to win a few more times before I get the hang of it. “You can use one of the heaven tiles, if you think it’ll help.”

I groan, and it’s so obvious he’s trying to keep a grin off his face as he pats the bag I’d have to blindly draw from if I were to take a heaven tile. “No thanks, last time I tried that you got my black lotus piece. I’ll go here.” I start to slide my last earth tile forward, but Rei smacks my hand away and uses one of my fire tiles to break through the line Nanuq’s assembled on the far side of the board and put his white lotus piece in peril.

“Match.”

“What the—how’d you do that?” Nanuq asks, peering down to look at the board as if something will yield under closer examination. “You watched us for maybe ten seconds!”

“I played often when I was a temple servant, we would wager our chores so the loser would be stuck with them. Would you like to learn the proper way, Kyoshi?”

Nanuq was quick to extol the relaxing qualities of this game, but it seems awfully stressful to me. “No, I don’t like this, too confusing. Maybe when we’re not in the air.”

“Then we can only hope the fate of the world never hinges on your pai sho skills,” Rei says, closing her eyes again. Instead I shuffle over to the spot where we have our bedrolls pushed together and start to pull Nanuq over for a nap before the acrid stench of smoke fills the air. Bima starts listing to the right in an attempt to avoid the rising column of black smoke on her other side. “Yun?”

“Something’s burning down there,” she says as Bima starts to level out under her coaxing. “Whoa, something big…should we take a look?”

As awful as it makes me feel to think, this will at least break the monotony of flying for hours on end. “Bring us down, slowly. Let’s see what’s going on.”

What’s going on is a blaze consuming what appears to be a large storehouse on the edge of a village, with a crowd milling around it while some others rush in, pulling out people and crates in almost equal measure. “Hold on, don’t land yet,” Nanuq says, pointing a little ways past the flames to the town commons. “Go over that well there.”

I get a sense of what he wants to do, and we go to opposite sides of the saddle as Bima slows to a near-halt over the well. We reach down—far down, the well is nearly dry—and draw up most of the remaining water. It trails in thick streams behind us as Bima swings wide to get us right over the fire. Yun wrestles her into flying through the smoke, clutching her reins with one hand and bending a clear path through it with the other, and we release the water onto the storehouse.

The effect isn’t quite what we had hoped for. Some of the flames dim, and soaking the building’s wooden frame creates firebreaks in some spots, but there’s no shortage of dry fuel we didn’t manage to hit. “New plan,” I say, reaching down to whack Bima’s flank until she starts to descend. “Rei, Nanuq, we’re going down there, help whoever you can. Yun, quenching it didn’t work, we’re going to starve it. Get a big bubble started.”

“Should I land first—?”

We’re low enough. I grab Nanuq and leap out of the saddle with him in tow, thrusting a fan toward the ground to break our fall. Rei follows a moment later, bursts of white flame beneath her boots slowing her descent until she snuffs them. Nanuq can’t do much more than gesture for people to move away from the fire once we land, but at least they seem inclined to go along with the man who fell from the flying bison. Rei articulates the order a bit better before jumping over a collapsed door and into the blaze.

A howling wind kicks up in the meantime, courtesy of Yun and Bima forming a tight perimeter overhead. I can barely see the air getting pushed out of the dome enclosing the fire, but I can feel it, a continuous hot rush warming my skin and making my eyes water. Fans in hand, I help it along, yanking out as much air as I can while Yun prevents any more from getting in. Rei comes crashing out of the building, kicking down a burned section of wall with a man almost twice her size slung over her shoulder. She falls to all fours and gasps for breath beside me once she gets away from the bubble.

“I was still inside,” she growls, her voice raw. The man she carried out stumbles over to the others, where Nanuq is treating burns.

“Sorry.”

She folds her arms and watches the fire dim, looking almost mournful as it chokes and dies. When I can’t see any more flames, I slip my fans back into my belt, and Bima breaks her holding pattern to land nearby. “There…wasn’t anyone else inside, right?” I ask.

“Not that I could see. But there was a great deal of smoke making that difficult.”

I tighten the straps of my new water skin, one of Nanuq’s spares, and loosen the cork. “Let’s check.”

Bima is providing a welcome distraction for the children, and we leave Yun and Nanuq to control the crowd while we step into the burned-out building. It’s definitely a warehouse—or it was, rather. The blackened, charred walls and ceiling are barely supporting their own weight and won’t even do that for much longer, not with the way what remains of the wood is groaning and creaking. I raise a few earthen supports against the corners, but it’s a very temporary solution. Better to tear the whole thing down before it collapses.

“Kyoshi, over here.”

Rei holds up most of a shattered lamp in one hand and a broken ring in the other. The post beside her is especially burned, but I can just make out a nail right above eye level in the wood. “Most probably source of the fire. The lamp fell when this ring snapped and ignited the chaff on the floor.”

“That’s iron, it wouldn’t snap easily.”

She brings it over and hands it to me so I can take a closer look. The broken portion is definitely smoothed down and thinner than the rest. “Not immediately, no. But over many years of someone tapping on the lamp to pass the time, wearing it across the nail there, and the bout of cold weather last night…”

I nod and toss it back on the ground. “Let’s not mention that. Don’t want them killing the night watchman over an accident.”

The rest of our search is uneventful, and all we find are a few crates and sacks that survived the fire. Most of the stored goods burned to ashes before we could quash the flames. I give one of the crates a good kick and the side collapses, letting a length of rope spill out. “Wonder what they were keeping in here. Those people were running back in to save some of it.”

“Food, most likely,” Rei says, heading back to what could generously be described as the entrance. “Among other sundry items. This is probably the communal storage for the village, it would explain why they were so ready to run into a burning building. The harvest season is over, this may have been all the food they had stored for the winter.”

“Let’s hope they got enough out, then.”

Without a fire to watch and fret over, most of the onlookers have gone back to the village. It seems slightly bigger on the ground than it does from the sky, but not by much. Little more than a cluster of public buildings with houses radiating outward. Not entirely unlike Seizhon, really. Maybe with more red than green. “This building needs tearing down,” I say in my best Hitennese. “It’s going to collapse soon.”

“And who are you, nun?” a middle-aged man asks. Nun? They only saw me airbend, I suppose, but I hardly look like an Air Nomad. The sun shines off the man’s head, and he has a long waistband to go with his nauseating air of self-importance. “You can’t rip down our storehouse!”

“I’m the Avatar, and I used to—Rei, what’s the word for ‘build?’”

“ _Tateru_.”

“Right, I used to build places like this and it’s coming down sooner or later. Let me put up a new one for you, one made of stone. Much less flammable.”

He looks around, but not quite at anyone or anything. “Fall is a very inauspicious time to build, Avatar.”

“The impudence of the starling makes for a damp and bitter feather,” Rei says, pulling out some piece of old verse in a trice. It must be a force of habit, because I know outside of temples and castles the common folk of Hitenno value symbol and metaphor much less. In rather plainer terms, she adds, “Would you rather starve? You can have an inauspicious building or nothing.”

He turns his gaze on her, and then on Yun and Nanuq as they join us. “None of you important people ever gave a mind to our village. Not the government, not any Avatar. We haven’t needed your help and we don’t need it now that you’ve deigned to grace us with your presence, _Your Holiness_.”

“You ungrateful little—”

Yun tugs on the sleeve of my kimono, always my sweet little conscience. Be good, Kyoshi. The Avatar is a symbol of balance and order, it won’t do to start knocking innocent heads, no matter how much I might want to. And I want to. I clench my fist instead. “Fine. Let’s go. We have to get to Kasai anyway.” They can sit here and be haughty and hungry. Yun frowns at my refusal to insist on helping, but whistles for Bima all the same as the townspeople start to disperse.

“Wait, please don’t leave,” I hear as we turn to depart. It’s the man Rei pulled from the burning storehouse, a little blackened by soot but otherwise fine. There are streaks of white in his beard and hair, and the apron stretching over his belly is frayed around the edges. He doesn’t look altogether unlike my father apart from the lighter skin, though I shouldn’t let that foul my opinion of him. “Please, we do need a new storehouse. I couldn’t pay you, but I’ve got good food and a roof to sleep under, if you’re willing.”

A little courtesy goes a long way. There’s a good stretch of land across from the old building, clear of trees and mostly flat. Setting up an intricate interior by myself would be too much, but pulling up four walls and a roof isn’t so taxing. Some of the townspeople watch with interest while I finish up and walk the perimeter and punch out high, thin windows near the top for light. Not my finest work, perhaps, but better than a wooden firetrap by a damn sight. Bigger, too. “There,” I say, wiping some sweat from my brow. “You’ll have to take care of the door yourselves.”

Yun throws her arms around me and jumps up to kiss my cheek. “That was a good thing you did.”

“Thank you, Avatar, thank you,” he says in between deep bows. “My name’s Yori. And Gorou’s a fool, he’d sooner starve than not light incense and consult the spirits on the smallest thing. We needed somewhere to store our crop…what’s left of it. People around here just have a dim view of the government and big to-do people.”

“But not you?” Nanuq asks when Rei finishes translating.

“Well, they didn’t all get their tails hauled out of a fire by a nun.”

Rei bristles. “I am not a nun, I am a Fire Sage.”

“There are women Fire Sages now?”

“There is one,” she replies.

“Ha! What a world.”

She grinds her teeth. “How much the blind badger mole thinks he sees…”

“One day we might even have women Avatars,” I say dryly. “The struts I put in the old warehouse should hold long enough to carry everything out. It should be knocked down once it’s empty. You said something about food?”

“Yes, right this way!”

He jumps in front of us with surprising agility and beckons us on. “My wife and I will get you all a fine meal and a finer bed still, my home is through the village a ways.”

“It will have to be a rather large bed,” Rei says in Chikyan so he can’t understand, her mouth stretching into a wry half-grin. “We have the time, they will not expect us in Kasai for several days yet.”

Yori leads us into the town proper, insofar as it can be called a town. Calling the place a sorry mess seems almost too kind. Stones are jutting out of the road when they’re not missing altogether, almost every other roof has a hole in it, and the little fountain near the well is bone-dry. At least in Seizhon there were plenty of earthbenders who could repair things like this without a second thought. I never gave much mind to how the other nations handled this kind of maintenance, and it looks like they simply can’t in some places. Even in Shinden, there was only one other earthbender and we were fixing things up for a month after the spirit rampage. I can only imagine the opportunities earthbenders would have in places like this.

“Are you a smith?” Yun asks, motioning to Yori’s apron while I translate.

“A baker, though with so much rice burned away I’m not sure how much business I’ll see this winter. I was trying to save some of my stock when you rescued me. Tamiko and I’ll make do though, like always. Watch your feet on the split in the road here.”

“Shinden is even farther from the capital and not nearly this bad,” I say quietly.

Nanuq looks around. “That was a port town where lots of traders stopped on their way to Hanshu. This…isn’t.”

Yori’s home is attached to the back of his run-down bakery, where his wife and children are busy working the ovens. His sons Kiei and Jin are skeptical when he introduces me as the Avatar, at least until I start stoking the fire in their ovens and picking up pieces of stone. After that, they’re suitably impressed. The reverence isn’t the worst thing in the world, as long as people don’t get carried away with it. His wife Tamiko thanks us all profusely when he explains why he brought us along, and Rei gasps when she picks her up in a crushing hug. “Help,” she wheezes, feet dangling helplessly off the floor.

Their bakery’s specialty turns out to be a kind of sweet saffron rice dish, and after the somewhat bland provisions we’ve had for the past few days, it’s all we can do to keep ourselves from eating them out of business. It’s not easy when they keep putting fresh plates in front of us. “Things seem a bit rough here,” I say. “Is it always like this?”

“Well, sometimes repairs don’t happen very quickly, but it’s not that bad,” Yori says as he clears a few empty plates. “We’ve got everything we need here. Sure, sometimes the roof leaks or the weeds come up through the floor, and I don’t know how many times I’ve fallen on that loose brick in the road, but…what was I saying again?”

“The taxes here only flow one way,” Tamiko says with a weak smile, making an upward motion with her thumb.

Yori proudly proclaims the guest bed to be his house’s best, which makes me wonder about the state of the others. I realize I’m tall, but my feet are going to be dangling off the end unless I curl up, and then no one else will have any space. “Afraid I’ve only got the one room,” he says sheepishly as we look around. “I can bring in some extra pillows and blankets for you.”

He steps out to do so while I test the bed. It’s nothing like the one at the temple, but it’s softer than Bima’s saddle and at this point that counts for plenty. And…yes, even my calves are halfway off the edge. “I will take the floor, then,” Rei says, sitting down to take off her boots. “You seem to have staked your claim already.”

“There’s probably room here if we don’t sprawl out,” I tell her, but she shakes her head.

“You are not going to convince me to help expand your harem so baldly, Avatar Kyoshi.”

I really was just trying to be nice, but at some point she’s going to goad me into trying. Yun sticks her tongue out and then Yori returns, and we make a small show of arranging all the blankets on the floor for him. Once he leaves and we’ve all washed up and changed, we stack the pillows and blankets for Rei, and she sits on them to meditate while we try to figure out how we can possibly sleep three abreast on this bed. Nanuq offers to take the floor as well, but finally I put Yun on top of me and split the width with him. “If you roll over, I get squished,” she says.

“Me too.”

I roll my eyes and kiss them both goodnight. “I’ll be careful.”

Yun nestles in as best she can on my chest, and I snuff the lamp on the nightstand. It’s about an hour before they both nod off, their breaths in peaceful rhythm against me. “Rei?” I whisper.

“No, Kyoshi. Maybe, _maybe_ , if you were Yangchen…”

“Yangchen? You know she’s been dead for fifty years, right? And a woman? I thought you said you preferred men, anyway.”

“Fifty-two years, you need not remind me,” she says, her voice low and wistful. “And not exclusively, as I know I mentioned. I am a lady of two courts, like you.”

All right, I’ll need to revisit this when I’m not so tired and I don’t have the great-great-niece of the woman in question sleeping on top of me. “I’m not trying to get you in bed right now, calm down. The other towns around Hitenno, are they like this, too? All beat to hell and sorry-looking?” I ask.

Rei shuffles out of her lotus position and sits against the side of the bed, bumping my hand as she does. I don’t know what she actually does or doesn’t want, because she nudges at my fingers until I stroke her hair and play with her loose braid. “I have not been to every town and village in Hitenno, but the inland settlements on Baihe and Huanghe are much the same. Little of their taxes, if any, return from the capital for public works.”

“And everyone just accepts this?”

“The exchequer derives its authority from the Fire Lord, and she is the regent of Agni, the divine spirit of the sun. Who would presume to challenge such power?” she asks, her breath rasping in the quiet room. “And in a more immediate, temporal sense, the army is under her control as well.”

“How convenient.”

“Is it not the same in Chikyu? The main difference would be that your people can make their own repairs more easily, but things are largely the same everywhere. The common people toil to support the ruling class and then enjoy the protections that come with being part of the citizenry.”

“That’s not right,” I say, still stroking her hair. Yun’s started to snore lightly, with one of her legs sprawled wide over Nanuq. “These people are being left to fend for themselves, they’re not enjoying any protections.”

Rei kisses my hand and shuffles over to her nest of pillows and blankets, humming a final prayer to herself before she settles in for the night. “You should take up this matter with the Fire Lord.”

“I intend to.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Lady of two courts” is probably one of the better euphemisms I've come up with.
> 
> As much as this might look like filler, it's not, establishing Kyoshi's populism is important for things to come later. Korra's villains were all about ideals taken too far and I'm rolling with that pattern.
> 
> On another note, I'd like to take a minute to gauge interest in more original projects. I'll still be working on these stories for the time being, but eventually I'd like to do something that could help pay the bills since this is really all I'm good at. I'm rather fond of this kind of setting, fantasy with an East Asian/Pacific Rim flavor (there's quite enough ersatz Western Europe fantasy already, in my opinion), so that's what I'd like to work with. So...any interest?


	24. Kasai-kyō

When I was very young, my mother would tell me about Kaiko, the city she was from and where I departed the Earth Kingdom for the first time. To hear her tell it, Kaiko was a massive city rivaling Ba Sing Se itself, filled with every luxury I could imagine. She’d lull me to sleep with stories about the winding roads and the docks stretching out of sight, impossible to see the length of except from a ship. Shinden is much the same size, and my daydreams go back to my idea of a ‘city,’ what size it really is.

And then I see Kasai.

Nothing could have prepared me for the sheer size of the capital when Nanuq jostles my shoulder and I sit up in the saddle. The places I’ve thought of as cities seem little more than motes of dust compared to the sprawl stretching into view under the midday sun. I don’t think I can see the whole thing, even from the air, but somehow that only adds to my awe. Apart from several spires on some of the more westerly buildings—the grand temple and the palace, I would assume—most of the shops and homes far below blend into continuous segments of wood and stone. We’re approaching from the southeast, and the harbor is most prominent, hosting dozens of ships of different shapes and sizes, flying all manner of flags in the stiff breeze. Some I recognize, most of them a Chikyan green slashed with the silver of the royal house, but there are plenty of others from the Water Tribes and even a few Air Nomad standards scattered among the bright reds and golds of the Hitennese vessels.

“Is it all you imagined, Yun?” Rei asks, her arm hanging over the edge of the saddle to idly scratch Bima’s side.

“It’s amazing— _whoa_!”

Bima groans as something goes racing past us, little more than a blur of black and red against a cloudless sky. It’s gone before any of us can get a better look, with only the smell of ash tinging the air to prove it was ever here at all. “What in Sanna’s name was that?” Nanuq asks, clutching at his chest.

Rei points to a few more shapes swirling through the air to the west. “One of the dragons that call the city home. They are curious creatures, and Bima was an unfamiliar scent.”

“They’re not going to try and eat her, are they?” Yun asks as she tightens her grip on the reins. Rei has to think about it for a moment.

“Doubtful…perhaps you should stable her here on the harbor until we can find her accommodations nearer to the palace and the mountains, where the dragons nest. Avatar Yangchen built a bison platform within the palace walls for when she visited Fire Lord Kozei, but we should not assume its good condition. Land near those Air Nomad ships at the south end of the harbor.”

There are a few monks sitting around with their unloaded cargo who perk up at Bima’s landing, although some of the ostrich horses pulling carts nearby that are less enthused by the sudden newcomer. Yun hops down to chat with the monks while we begin packing things up in the saddle. The supplies we took from the temple and what Yori sent us off with are almost gone, a happy consequence of Kiku’s careful budgeting, and all we need carry are our packs. It’s been months since I’ve taken anything more than a daytrip inland on Baihe, and the bag feels unfamiliar on my shoulders. Still, it feels nice to have some solid ground under my feet. Doesn’t matter how many times Yun gets me to take the reins, I’m not meant to be up in the air.

“Bima, over here,” Yun says, beckoning her over to the ostrich horse stable. The owner goes a bit bug-eyed when he sees what Yun means to have him accommodate, but some quick words from Rei—along with more than a few silver pieces—settle the matter. “It kind of looks better from the air, doesn’t it?”

There’s some truth to that, certainly. From the ground, the disrepair of some of the buildings is more obvious, not too different from Yori’s village apart from the scale. Despite all the ships, several longshoremen are sitting around with nothing to do, shooting dice and arguing over winnings. “Smells better from the air, too,” I mutter. Is it like this everywhere in the country, even the capital?

Nanuq doesn’t seem to mind the stench as much. “It’s only low tide, nothing much to do about that. You should smell a beached lion whale after it’s been sitting for a few days. My sister Seleq and I found one of those when we were younger—”

“Come on, we just ate,” I say, putting a hand over his mouth before my stomach turns any more. “How do we get to the palace, Rei?”

She looks down the nearest road heading west. “I doubt whether we would find any carriages or palanquins here in the Teichi Quarter…best to start walking.”

“Why wouldn’t we find those here?” I ask as she leads us down the nearest road.

“Because the people who can afford to patronize them—the nobility, the respectable folk of Kasai—have no interest in the local flavor, or much of anything outside of the Imperial Quarter. They have their poems and tea and amorous nighttime wanderings to occupy them. Why would small matters like trade and the state of their city be of any concern?”

“You can have quite the acid tongue when you want to,” Yun says.

Rei looks over at her and chances a small grin. “I can do no greater injury to the gentry than hold a mirror up to them.”

Seems like a far cry from the things she was saying the other night, but I guess she can understand a system without condoning it. Although she isn’t exactly a member of the impoverished citizenry, or at she isn’t anymore. None of them are, I realize. Yun, Nanuq, Rei—clerical lives are still work, to be sure, but I was the one fighting for scraps. I’m not sure how to feel about that.

The next district of the city—Rei calls it the Hake Quarter—is considerably nicer, with smoother roads and houses and shops of finer construction. So it seems, anyway. Thin wood and rice paper will never seem very sturdy to me. Many of the homes also have small yards fenced in by wrought iron, some with simple designs and some farther west with more complex workmanship.

“Where’d everybody go?” Nanuq asks. It’s a fair point, the Teichi Quarter might have been gritty but it was bustling, too. Apart from a few young men hurrying back and forth clutching sheaves of paper, it seems empty here. “It’s like everyone stopped at that street back there.”

“They did. People that live here are likely at court or in their homes. Wandering about when one has servants for menial tasks is considered unseemly, especially for women.”

“What if someone needs to go somewhere or do something?” Yun asks.

“They would use a carriage with an escort.” Rei shrugs. “Kasai is not the most practical of places.”

That much is obvious. Explains the odd looks we’re getting, too. Earth Kingdom and Air Nomad people probably aren’t terribly common this deep into Hitenno, but even Rei is getting her share of cocked eyebrows. Fine, they can look askance if they want. ‘Unseemly’ isn’t the worst thing I’ve been called.

Next is the Imperial Quarter, where the fences are higher and have white gold alloyed in with baser metals. The streets widen out, and the parts of the properties we can see through the fences are awash with open space, dotted with trees and ponds and gardens. Plenty of outbuildings, too—every block of estates is nearly as big as Seizhon’s town square. “Taxes at work?” Nanuq asks, running his hand along the design on one of the fences, a rather masterfully crafted dragon done in gold leaf.

“Indeed. The palace gate should be on the next road over, this way.”

We head down a cross street and come out the other side on the main boulevard, wide enough for six carriages abreast and foot traffic to boot. Bright red brick inlaid with onyx borders it on either side, and it’s much cleaner than any road has a right to be. I’d almost think no one dares to walk on it.

And in front of us, thrusting proudly into the sky behind ten feet of fence, is the palace.

Its red central tower is fifty feet to a side by dead reckoning, standing above even some of the mountains to the west. Two smaller wings— _smaller_ being a very relative term—flank the central structure and cut a sharp silhouette with a dozen eaves between their twin pagodas. Enormous friezes of stone and metal line their bases, visible even over the high walls. How does something so massive even stay up without collapsing in on itself? There are dragons twirling through the air high above the tower, sending playful swaths of fire at one another and making the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. “Should I start bending things until the guards figure out who I am?”

“That should not be necessary,” Rei says as we approach a pair of guards manning the main gate. Their dou and kusazuri are webs of hard leather plates stained a deep red with brighter crimson around the edges, and they each have a simple straight-headed spear, a yari, held loosely at their sides. Their grip tightens up a bit when we approach, though. “Well met. Her Majesty sent a summons to the Avatar, and she is here to answer it. Show them the message you received, Kyoshi.”

“I, uh…think I might’ve left it back at the temple.”

Rei pinches the bridge of her nose.

“When’d they start dressing up the nuns like Fire Sages?” one of the guards asks the other, who shrugs.

“I _am_ a…Kyoshi, start bending things. Please limit your destructiveness.”

The guards end up looking a bit on edge—I guess that’s to be expected when someone a head taller than them in stark white face paint takes up a bending stance—but I stay courteous and only pull off a piece of the wall behind them. Earthbenders might not be common in Hitenno, but we’re not unheard of, either. Both of them take a step back when I spark a bit of flame in my other hand and move them about to prove I’m really controlling them. I snuff the fire and slip the bit of wall back into place, patching it up to make it impossible to tell where the seam is. “Can we go in now?”

One of them opens a smaller door next to the large main gate and shouts to some more guards patrolling inside before ushering us through. The grounds are just as opulent as I would expect for such a building, with lush greenery all over the caldera, and even an entire lake off to the side. What I thought was a sculpture of a dragon looks up as we walk by, but it doesn’t do anything more than watch the guard lead us on with a lazy curiosity. I’ve never seen one in the flesh, but I think I’d prefer being around badger moles. At least those can’t start breathing fire. The four of us must look a sight, traipsing alongside a neatly-maintained garden of stones and white sand. A renegade nun, a Water Tribe prince, a Fire Sage and the Avatar all walk into a palace…sounds like a bad joke, really.

Upon closer inspection, the palace is a masterful blend of sharp angles in some places and wide, sweeping curves in others. Gold and silver cover the walls in fine filigree, framing marble and alabaster carvings of complex figures. The main doors open into a grand antechamber lined with ancient tapestries of Fire Lords past, their portraits casting somber gazes over the length of the room. I can’t help but notice a strangely familiar woman in one of them, standing beside a seated man in the third-most recent tapestry. Her robes are a strange mix of Hitennese and Tochi styles, and her tattoos are a rich cyan. Two young boys crowd around her, the taller one in red and the shorter one in saffron. Nanuq cocks an eyebrow. “One of her…visits to the Fire Lord?” I ask.

Rei glances up at the tapestry as we walk by, resting on Yangchen’s portrait for a long moment before catching up with us. “I would think you more than most would know that nuns value companionship as much as anyone else.”

“Must’ve missed the scroll at the air temple that mentioned this.” Seems like a big detail to omit.

“No single biography paints a complete picture of her life,” Rei says. “You would have to read them all for a proper understanding.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because I _have_ read them all.”

Yun finally realizes what we’re saying about her great-great-aunt and goes a beautiful red as we arrive at an impossibly large set of doors. I can’t even say they’re a monstrous waste, I’m more interested in how they’re standing under their own weight. They’re a dark, heavy wood with enormous brass hardware, more suited in size to fully-grown dragons than people. Do they bring dragons into the palace? I’m not sure I’d put it past these people, really. The guard escorting us goes up to a captain at a more appropriately-sized door off to the side, whispering something and pointing at our group. The edges of her armor are white rather than red, and she’s wearing a tachi on her belt instead of toting a yari. She nods and dismisses him before opening the door a crack and peering inside.

“Got here awfully fast, Avatar,” she says, opening the door just enough to slip inside. “Hold a moment, if you please.”

The low hum of conversation in the room beyond falls silent after she goes in and leaves us alone in the antechamber. I can hardly see the center of the vaulted ceiling above us or the topmost supporting columns before they fade into shadow, and under my feet I can feel real stone going down quite a ways, not like the thin veneer in the Shudan sanctuary.

I don’t have the chance to look around further before the captain returns and waves us inside. “One more thing,” Rei says as we pass into the main chamber and a wave of heat from dozens of bodies hits us at full force. “Do not turn your backs on the Fire Lord. At all. To do so is a grave offense.”

“What if we have to, you know, leave the room?” Nanuq asks.

“Then we back out.”

Rei nudges me forward before I can tell her how incredibly asinine that sounds. The room we find ourselves in looks much the same as the one we just left, apart from the warmth and being filled with rows and rows of people dressed in all their finery, a sea of silks and brilliant jewelry as far as I can see. A sandalwood incense hangs heavily in the air, so thick as to be almost stifling. At the far end of the room is a small pavilion half-shrouded in darkness, large enough for maybe one person to sit underneath. The lighting in the room is surprisingly poor, with only torches on the walls and supporting columns, making it hard to focus on much but the simple shape of the pavilion. “Follow me,” Rei says, striding slowly down the central aisle.

Everything is utterly silent as we make our approach, apart from the crackle of the flames coming from all directions. I notice the people ahead of us are craning their necks to get a look our way, but they’re not actually turning around and facing away from the front of the room. I can’t believe that’s an actual rule. Who does this Fire Lord think she is? Rei tugs sharply on the side of my kimono to signal me to stop at about the third row of courtiers and bows deeply. We follow suit, and I realize we never had a chance to change into our formal outfits. Oh well.

“Your Majesty, may I present Her Holiness the Avatar, Lady Kyoshi of Chikyu,” Rei says, speaking as loudly and as clearly as she can with her scarred voice. _Lady_ Kyoshi? Really? I’m far from any kind of nobility, and I’ve made that abundantly clear to her. “Avatar Kyoshi, this is Her Imperial Majesty, Daimyo of Hanshu and Empress of Hitenno, Fire Lord Muryo.”

I’m not exactly sure where I’m supposed to be looking. There’s a vague silhouette directly in front of us that I can’t get a good fix on, so I focus on the pointy little flame decoration atop the pavilion instead. Once my eyes adjust to the low light, I can make out a few more figures ahead of us. To the right of the pavilion is a middle-aged man, quite well-fed, with a shining black beard and his hair pulled up into a severe topknot. His kimono is mostly white with red around the edges, and in front of him is a small, portable table with flattened scrolls, a calligrapher’s brush, and a small wooden box. Nanuq bristles when he looks to the other side of the pavilion, where a tall Water Tribe woman around our age in all kinds of reds and golds is sitting with a large porcelain bowl of water. Something flashes over her expression when she sees our group, but she quickly slips back into a carefully crafted restraint.

And then, of course, there’s the Fire Lord.

A brazier hanging from the ceiling of the pavilion lights, and I can see a pallid young woman swathed in a heavy crimson robe that she isn’t quite filling out. Her head seems to be bowing slightly under the weight of the crown fixed into her topknot, and she looks so…tired. Even her long, shining black hair seems limp and exhausted. There are heavy bags under her dark amber eyes that stretch to her rather gaunt cheekbones, and her shoulders are slumped forward like she wants to fall asleep right then and there. A pang of sympathy stabs through me. I had half a mind to tell her about the way her citizens live on the capital island, and even in the capital itself, but she seems so fragile that a stiff breeze might bowl her over, let alone my comments. For the moment, I hold my tongue, and she gets to her feet with some assistance from the Water Tribe woman beside her.

Her light little footfalls echo several times in the quiet chamber, and she moves about as quickly as I’d expect for someone so frail-looking. The thought occurs to me to take a few steps forward and close some of the distance, but Rei holds me in place. When she passes the first two rows of courtiers, they all turn in their seats so they aren’t facing away from her. Once she stops, she doesn’t look at me, but at Rei. “Who are you?” she asks in an almost pathetically small voice.

“I—I am a humble sage of the flame, Your Majesty. Takarabe.”

Her nod is careful and measured, trailing slightly behind the recognition in her eyes. “Oh, of course, from Baihe! It’s so nice to finally meet the first woman Fire Sage. And you as well, Avatar Kyoshi,” she says, bowing enough to make her crown shift about in her topknot. “Who are your friends?”

Rei takes a step to the left to put them in better view. “Prince Nanuq of the Tayagun tribe, and Lady Yun of the Eastern Air Temple.”

Okay, Nanuq _is_ a prince, but where are the rest of these titles coming from? Air Nomads have no actual nobility, even their Avatars get treated like any other monk or nun. Rei’s just making this up as she goes along. She gives them both a respectful little nod.

“It’s wonderful to meet all of you,” the Fire Lord says, leaning a bit on her attendant. “I’m so glad you accepted my invitation, Avatar Kyoshi. And so punctual! Please, find yourselves some seats, we’re almost done for the afternoon.”

Some of the people in the first row scramble to make room for us as she returns to her seat, and the man who was at her side slips by to greet us before we sit down. His cheeks puff almost up to his eyes and lend him a somewhat anguine look not helped by the way the sides of his mouth are parted. I notice that he doesn’t seem to have any problem turning his back on the Fire Lord. “Welcome to our humble city, Avatar,” he says with a voice that makes me think his tongue is very slightly too big for his mouth. “I am Chancellor Hebi. Should you or your friends want for anything, please, let me know.”

The court session can only be called ‘governing’ in the merest terms. Some of the courtiers snipe back and forth with poems that must have some hidden meaning, because everyone seems rather amused at what seems to be only half the verse. Rei smirks at a few of them, but doesn’t let us in on the humor. Finally they get around to something that sounds important, though it turns out to be a regulation on what colors the lining of a particular kind of headwear can be and what rank of people can wear it.

“Is this a joke?” I ask under my breath.

Nanuq clasps my hand and keeps his eyes fixed on the official making the proclamations about hat linings. “My mother’s meetings with her advisers were never like this, frivolous isn’t a strong enough word.”

“All of this is carefully constructed, if legally binding, pageantry,” Rei says quietly. “The real power in Hitenno lies with the chancellor and his family, the Jiwara clan.”

“Then what’s the point of all this?” Yun asks, drumming her fingers in her lap. “Shouldn’t we be doing something useful instead of listening to them argue about the proper way to fasten a kimono? How come the Fire Lord doesn’t do something about this?”

Rei tugs idly on her braid. “We all have our parts to play.”

It’s another hour of hammering out the rules of Hitennese court fashion and what I have to assume are witty repartees traded in maddeningly fragmented pieces of verse before things wind down. The Fire Lord leaves first, struggling to get back to her feet and finally disappearing through a side door. After that, the rest of the courtiers are free to leave or talk amongst themselves. The chancellor follows the Fire Lord, and the way the room relaxes at his departure is impossible to miss.

“That woman with the Fire Lord,” I say as our row starts to thin out. “Did you you know her, Nanuq?”

“Yeah, Kania is one of the healers from my tribe,” he tells us. “She had a thing with my brother a few years ago, but I thought she left for one of the southern Air Nomad towns. That must’ve changed…still, looks like she did pretty well for herself.”

“Indeed,” Rei says. “A palace life would be much more comfortable than working as a healer in Patola or Caoyan. Spirits know the Fire Lord needs the constant care.”

Well, that much is clear, she looked like she was about to fall on the floor before she sat back down. Yun nuzzles into my side once the seats around us free up. “What’s wrong with her?” I ask, and Rei shrugs.

“Her Majesty has always been sickly, but her older siblings did not survive their infancies and she did. There was talk of enthroning Prince Hyōbu or Prince Hachiro after Fire Lord Azai died, but they are the children of a concubine while she is the daughter of the previous princess consort, Lady Kuri, so her claim was better. Her maternal grandfather took great pains to ensure her enthronement, despite the fact that she will very likely never have an heir.”

I cock an eyebrow. Even though I don’t go in much for things like royalty and nobility, I know enough to make that seem like a very bad idea. “Sounds like a succession crisis waiting to happen. Who’s her maternal grandfather?”

Rei nods to the empty seat beside the pavilion. “Chancellor Hebi.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I threw a lot of names at you in this chapter, so [here's](http://i.imgur.com/nzUHLeH.png) the (very condensed) Fire Nation royal family tree.
> 
> Fire Lord Muryo, art by [AATKAW](aatkaw.tumblr.com)


	25. The Avatar and the Fire Lord

“So I guess we know where the real authority in the room is,” I say. Enough people have left for me to feel safe speaking freely. Rei’s words about viper pits suddenly seem much more immediate. “She doesn’t have any real power, does she?”

“The Fire Lord has absolute power…in theory. The reality is more complicated. Hitennese polity is a contentious matter at even the best of times, we must tread lightly.”

“Nanuq?”

We all perk up, but him especially when the Water Tribe woman, Kania, returns from wherever the Fire Lord went and comes over to us. He’s hardly able to stand before she pulls him into a hug, and it’s more than a little amusing to see him picked up off his feet by someone else. “Hey, Kania—you got strong—what’re you doing here in Kasai?”

“I left to go and be a healer, what are _you_ doing here? Chief Suli didn’t seem like she’d ever let you out of the tribe, and now you show up thousands of miles away at the palace with the Avatar,” she says, looking me over as we stand up. Apart from her darker skin and deep blue eyes, she’s all in Hitennese style, with most of her thick brown hair pulled up in a severe topknot. “They weren’t kidding, you’re really tall.”

“So I’ve been told.”

“Weren’t you going to one of the air temples?” Nanuq asks, nudging in a little closer to me. Aww, he thinks I’m jealous.

Kania nods, but then she shrugs. “Petals on the breeze, at the mercy of the wind—”

“Lay refreshed and well-traveled,” Rei finishes. “You seem to have adapted to court life well if you can quote Kimachi so fast.”

“Excuse me, Avatar Kyoshi.”

It’s the guard captain who saw us in earlier, addressing us in Chikyan and thumbing at the rich gold cord wrapped around the handle of her sword. Her grimace at Kania isn’t lost on us, a glare from bright amber eyes framed by a close crop of black hair, but she ignores it and steps away. “I’m Captain Ikeda, I was asked to show you to your quarters. This way, please.”

Once we’re past the gauntlet of curious glances from nobles and courtiers and back in the antechamber, she directs us down another corridor were smaller versions of the main hall’s tapestries hang. Yun and Rei slow their pace when we pass one of the tapestries with Fire Lord Kozei and Avatar Yangchen, but hurry after us when we make a turn.

“So you can bend everything, huh?” Ikeda asks. All the stilted formality only seems to extend as far as the throne room, and that’s fine with me. “It’d be nice to at least be able to firebend.”

“I would’ve thought all the guards here would be firebenders,” Yun says. “The captains, at least.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve got other skills.” She pats the pommel of her sword. “My sister Kage and I earned our places here because we’re the best at what we do. And here you go, four rooms. You can split them up however you like. Most of the servants here speak at least a little Chikyan if you need anything.”

With that, she takes her leave, and we look at the four doors situated at the end of the hallway. “I will be staying at the grand temple,” Rei says, nonetheless sliding open one of the doors. “Something tells me most of these rooms will be unnecessary, the beds here are rather large.”

Yun and Nanuq go a little red at her gentle barb. It’s not her first such comment about our arrangement, but it’s easily the most charged. Still, if she wants to have her fun, then I’ll have mine, too. “Come on Rei, I need you here to keep from making a fool of myself. And we’d only need the one room if these beds are as big as you say…”

She doesn’t blush, but I can see her clenching her jaw. “Your bed is quite full enough, I think,” she mumbles. “I will stay to make sure you do nothing untoward and to not offend our hosts, but we should still present ourselves at the temple by sundown.”

Rei slips into one of the rooms and slides the door shut in no uncertain terms. Yun’s laugh is high and nervous, like she’s coaxing herself into bringing up something she’d rather not. “Do you really, ah…”

“No, I’m just messing with her.” I can actually see the tension leave her body, and I ruffle her hair a little to reassure her. “How about this room?”

The bed does turn out to be quite large, although my feet still hang off the end a bit if I stretch out. Apart from that it’s enormously comfortable, although all the gold trim and decorative raden inlay on everything makes my room at the temple seem almost ascetic. I can only imagine how Rei’s room compares to her usual accommodations.

“How does this stack up against the Southern Water Tribes, Nanuq?” Yun asks, flopping down on the bed to my left. “I don’t think I’ve ever read anything about your architecture.”

“It’s definitely…redder here. The Shuinan have a palace made out of ice and some materials they imported from southern Tochi, but my family just has the biggest hut in our tribe.” He pauses to redo one of the braids hanging loose from the side of his head and then adds a little defensively, “It’s a nice hut. Think we have the run of this place?”

I want to do a little exploring, so I’m assuming we do. They both decide settle in for a quick nap, awkwardly shuffling toward one another, while I leave them be and knock on Rei’s door. She opens it without another smart remark, and I see she’s let out her braid and taken off her outer robes, leaving the burns on her arms displayed. “Yes?”

“We have to get Bima and bring her back here after we’re done at the temple.”

“As you wish.” She pads back to a bowl of water she’s put on the floor and strips off her undershirt before sitting down. The fine lines of her tattoos stretch along her back as she wets her hands and runs them over her burns, biting back whimpers as she tries to soothe the damaged skin. “Something else?”

“Well…Yangchen? Really? You know, I’m an Avatar too, and I happen to be alive.”

Rei sighs, gets up, and comes back over to shut the door in my face. All right, nothing subtle about that. Writing poetry will have to wait, I want to see how big this palace really is.

Some of the guards give me a second glance as I wander the halls, but never keep me from poking my head into any of the rooms. There must be nine or ten saunas in the wing we’ve been assigned, all of them built from finely crafted wood and stocked with waiting rocks and spring water. Each one seems to have four or so bedrooms nearby in much the same style as ours, richly appointed with soft bright silks and gold and silver veneers, all unused. My house—when I had a house—could’ve fit in one of these rooms and not even fill the whole thing. Everything my family owned probably wouldn’t be worth half as much as some of these bed sheets, either.

“Looking for something?”

Captain Ikeda is drumming her fingers along the handle of her tachi, one eyebrow up as she strolls down the corridor. For someone so powerfully built, she moves like a cat fox. Her expression is decidedly neutral, but that might be from training as much as disinterest. I close the bedroom door and shrug.

“Thought I’d give myself a tour. I’ve never been in a place this big.”

“Yeah, it’s a nightmare to get around if you don’t know where to go,” she says, jerking her head to beckon me along. “Her Majesty was hoping you’d join her in the north garden, it’s this way.”

Good. I need to talk to her.

We start heading back toward the main wing, where things have gotten a bit livelier. Apart from the main antechamber, there are a few more areas near the throne room where people can congregate and still be close to the heart of things. A few courtiers in a hall off the throne room are playing something on a tsungi horn and a koto, and the tune is almost familiar until they stop at our sudden intrusion.

“You didn’t seem very fond of the Fire Lord’s healer earlier,” I say as we enter a covered outdoor area at the rear of the palace. A single bonsai tree in its pot sits on the railing, drinking in some midday sun while another courtier examines it for any leaves in need of pruning.

“I might be fonder of her if she’d do her damn job.”

At least there’s someone here who speaks plainly, I could barely work out half the nonsense the courtiers were throwing at each other earlier. “I mean, I’ve got nothing against Water Tribe girls, even had a few myself, but she’s supposed to be such a good healer, right? Fire Lord never gets any better, though. It’s not like I expect her to come down in the morning and spar with us, but the poor girl can barely walk on her own. She doesn’t seem to be getting any worse, but Kania gets to stick around in all that finery the whole time.”

“Maybe my healer friend should have a look at her.”

“Good luck, the chancellor goes at most anyone who gets near her like a rabid dog.” She looks me up and down, maybe a little longer than strictly necessary. “Might think twice about doing it to you, though. I speak more Chikyan than most of the other staff, so they assigned me to you and your friends. Come find me if you need a break from all the respectable folk.”

“Got anything interesting going on?” I ask.

She nods after a moment. “You look like you could knock some heads around. Some of us underlings open a few bottles of sake a couple nights a week and go a round or two, hand to hand. It’s a good way to work off stress that’s not writing poetry or getting all done up in kabuki,” Ikeda says before glancing back at my face paint. “Uh, no offense.”

“None taken. I might give that a try later, thanks.”

We come upon another lake half-hidden by tall reeds and barrier rocks. A few turtle ducks are swimming around near the edge, but otherwise the surface is spotless and still. The Fire Lord is sitting on a covered bench with a steaming cup of tea in front of the water, tossing some rice into the water for the ducklings to snatch up. “The Avatar, Your Majesty,” Ikeda says, clearing her throat to get the girl’s attention.

She looks back and smiles weakly. “Thank you, captain. That will be all. Would you come sit with me, Avatar Kyoshi?”

Ikeda goes along another path back to her post. “Just ‘Kyoshi’ is fine, really,” I say, taking up the other side of the bench.

“Then you can call me Muryo.”

She throws another handful of rice into the water with a shaking hand and smiles as the turtle ducks start climbing over one another to get at the food. “That was the first court session I’ve sat in on.”

“I hope it wasn’t too terribly boring,” she says. “I can’t imagine it compares very well to running around, saving people. That has to be better than sitting in a warm, stuffy room. Did you and your companions find the apartments to your liking?”

“They’re…more than adequate.” Far, _far_ more than adequate.

“I’m glad to hear that, we haven’t had the chance to renovate that wing in a few years. And you’re more than welcome to stay as long as you like, of course. In fact, you could have come right here rather than staying on Baihe, the sages at the Dragonfire Temple would’ve been happy to train you and confirm your accession.”

“I like Baihe, Shinden is pleasant and it’s nice and quiet at the Shudan Temple. Cities like this are still a little new to me.”

“Oh?” Muryo asks, scattering the last of the rice for the ducklings. “How are you finding Kasai? Or all of Hitenno, if you like? It must be quite different from Chikyu.”

This girl might actually snap in half if I’m too harsh. She’s slumped over even worse than she was in the throne room, and even though she’s making an effort to smile, she looks so terribly tired. A light touch, then. “Well…I couldn’t help but notice that a lot of places outside this district seem pretty run-down. Roof damage, split roads that make it hard for carts to get through, things like that.”

“Really?” She seems genuinely surprised, as if I’ve told her she’s wearing blue rather than red.

“When was the last time you left the palace?”

“My coronation, after my father abdicated two years ago,” Muryo admits, looking down at her lap. “I can’t travel very much because of my health, you see.”

I raise an eyebrow. “Not even into the city?”

“The Chancellor doesn’t think it’s a very good idea, he says I could get consumptive. It…it was that bad?” she asks, her mouth screwing up into a frown.

“Yes. I’ve only seen one other town here on Hanshu, and it was more or less the same. Broken roads, lots of disrepair, people just trying to survive.”

“Oh no! What town?”

“Ah—” Shit. I never got the name of Yori’s village. Great going, Kyoshi. “I’m afraid it’s slipped my mind. But it was the same story as a lot of towns inland on Baihe, too. They’re not getting the help they need, and at the same time I can’t help noticing how…nice everything is here in the palace and the Imperial Quarter.”

Muryo stares hard at the water for several minutes, hands trembling as her whole body wavers from side to side. Should I hug her? This isn’t at all how I saw this going. A small, bright sliver rolls down her cheek.

“I didn’t realize,” she mumbles with a new thickness in her voice, tugging at the hems of her sleeves. “I didn’t…I thought everyone was living as well as we were here. I don’t want my people to suffer and scrape by. Would you show me? I could get away from the palace for an evening if we were quiet about it.”

Kidnapping the Fire Lord was something I’d hoped to avoid, but it would be for a good cause. And she _is_ asking, so it’s not like I’m doing anything untoward. Rei probably still won’t be fond of the idea, even with that perspective. I’ll have to get Yun or Nanuq to distract her. This will take some thinking to put together. “Okay, I should be able to do that. I’m planning on going to the grand temple tonight, how about tomorrow?”

She nods and smiles before taking a sip of her tea. It must be horribly bitter with the way she grimaces. “Thank you, Kyoshi. I’ll do my very best to have the energy for it. Now where did Kania get to? She’s usually back by…by now…”

A bright red streak runs down from her nose, and she does her best to turn away from me before I can notice. No chance of that when the blood starts running down her hand, though. I want to grab some water from the lake and help her, but I hesitate. Nanuq hasn’t taught me very much healing, and I don’t want to accidentally hurt her. Captain Ikeda might not have much confidence in Kania, but I doubt I’m much better.

The way she starts shaking makes my decision for me. I pull up a handful of water from the lake and press it against her face, careful not to block her mouth so she can breathe. “Stay calm, okay?” Her eyes flutter shut every few seconds, but she manages to keep from moving too much while the water starts glowing and moving in a small, quick spiral. Blood keeps dripping around her mouth and down to the high collar of her robe, where it draws a harsh line across her pallid skin. Come on, come on…finally she jolts back with a high, sharp gasp, trembling and scratching madly at her arms through her sleeves. There’s no more blood coming, so I can bend what’s there into the lake along with my muddled healing water. She’s found a bout of strength, and she seems ready to tear through her silks to get at her skin. I wrap my arms around her and pull her against me, if only to keep her immobilized for the moment.

“Out…get them out,” she says weakly into my shoulder, struggling against my grip to no avail.

“I can’t let you hurt yourself, Muryo. Come on, deep breaths.”

She’s shuddering more than breathing, but eventually she levels out and stops trying to pull away. I give her back a few careful pats and she almost melts into my touch, gripping at my kimono and poking me with her crown. “It’s okay, you’re okay now.”

“I’m so sorry you had to see that, it’s just mortifying…”

Once she seems all right, I sit back on the bench and give her a little space to calm down and collect herself. The bags under her eyes look worse than before, and she can’t sit up straight at all. I feel for her, I do, but I have no idea how I’m supposed to get her out into the city if she’s liable to start bleeding and seizing on me. Nanuq would have to come along. The sun’s nearly set, I can’t think about this now. Rei wants me at the temple, and we still have to get Bima from the docks.

“Your Majesty?”

A few minutes too late, Kania comes along the footpath, playing with a single gold bangle on her wrist. Muryo seems to perk up by small degrees at the sound of her voice and slips a smile back on as she approaches. “Oh, Avatar Kyoshi. Is everything okay?”

“I think I’d like to go inside now,” Muryo says as she gets slowly to her feet. “The fresh air doesn’t seem to be doing me much good today. Thank you for sitting with me, Kyoshi.”

Kania grabs the Fire Lord’s teacup with one hand and holds out the other. Muryo latches onto her arm and nuzzles against her as they start along the footpath. At least they seem fond of each other. For now, I have to figure out how to get back to my room through this labyrinth of a palace.


	26. Sages and Sake

One of Ikeda’s guards shows me back to our wing once she’s able to piece together my broken Hitennese, so I have a few moments to be alone with my thoughts as we navigate the twisting halls. Muryo’s definitely sick, and it was only luck that put me there at the time and kept me from botching my healing and doing even more harm to her. And where was Kania off at in the middle of her episode? Maybe our guard captain has a point about the Fire Lord’s healer…I’ll have to ask Nanuq about her.

“Thank you, I can find it from here,” I say as we turn down the last corridor. “Can you please tell Captain Ikeda to expect our bison later?”

The guard nods and hurries back to her post. Well, time to see what they want at the temple. I knock lightly on Rei’s door and get a short hum of acknowledgement. “Can I come in? See, this is what knocking and asking is like.”

A very unamused little Fire Sage slides the door open. She’s put on her nice robes, the ones with a rich sable trim around the hems, and she’s tied her hair into an uncharacteristic topknot. “When I am a guest in the temple where _you_ live, I will knock as much as you like. Are you going to change?”

For a moment I consider telling her about Muryo’s attack, but she seems harried enough for now. “Yeah, I’ll go and pretty myself up for your friends.” I look over her shoulder to her desk, where there are several scrolls laid out with still-drying ink. “Writing something interesting?”

Her only response to that is a little color rising in her cheeks. “Are Yun and Nanuq coming with us? I thought they might appreciate the temple. Air Nomads and Water Tribe shamans…shaman assistants, rather…rarely have an opportunity to visit.”

“Yun has to come along anyway, I’m not flying Bima again.” I don’t know if it’s the odd angle I have to sit at or if she simply doesn’t like me, but that bison has a bad habit of trying to wrestle me off her neck at high altitudes. “I’ll go see if they’re awake.”

I’d almost rather not rouse them once I go back to our room and find them still dozing, curled up against each other. So peaceful…the bed creaks a little when I sit on the edge and run my hand through Yun’s hair. “Rise and shine, I can’t fly your big fluffy slobber monster without her trying to buck me off.”

“Bima’s a good bison,” she says groggily, and tightens her grip on Nanuq.

“She’s a terror for everyone but you. Come on,” I whisper, leaning down until my breath trails across her cheek. “You can sleep later. Once I’m done with you.”

That gets her attention well enough, and she jolts awake when she realizes it’s not me she’s holding on to. She backs up into me instead, and Nanuq reaches through the empty space left in her wake. “What—what happened?”

“You were napping, silly. I guess you’re used to nuzzling up to whoever’s next to you. Are you all right?”

“I’m fine, I…it was unexpected, that’s all. Nanuq’s a good cuddler.”

“Better than me?” I ask playfully, and wrap my arms around her waist.

She shrugs. “Just different. Your chest is softer, but he’s closer to my size. Both things are nice. Are we going to get Bima now?”

“Rei wants us to stop by the temple first so she can show me off to the other sages. You wanted to try on those nice kimonos she got for us, right?”

Yun brightens up at that, and she wriggles out of my grasp to go over to the section of the wardrobe she’s claimed. That leaves me free to lean over the length of the bed and lightly kiss Nanuq. The pace of his breathing falters, and he presses back with enthusiasm as he wakes up. His tongue flits over my lips, and it’s very tempting to finally entertain the twinge in my belly further, but we have things to do.

“Ah, easy.” I hope he’s not letting himself get pent-up in the meantime. His head falls onto the pillow, and he looks at me with a grin as I pull back. “We’re going to the temple and then getting Bima. Fancy clothes time.”

He seems almost as excited at that prospect as Yun, and hops out of bed before he sees her tug the topmost layer of her robes up over her head. With a surprising swiftness, he digs his kimono out of his drawer and slips into the washroom to give her some privacy. Of course, I don’t have any such compunctions about enjoying the view once I get myself dressed. She has a little trouble with the belt, it’s quite long for someone of her size, but she’s able to use the extra length to make a nice knot on her hip. “You can’t take very long strides in these, can you?” she asks as she almost hops her way over to me.

“Not really, they’re meant to be pretty, not functional. There’s a little catch you have to undo down here—there! Try now.”

Yun’s able to get back to her normal gait, and I reach down to do the same for mine. They’re lovely clothes, but practicality is going to win out for me every time. “Nanuq, how’s it going?”

In answer to my question, the washroom door slides open to show him there with a look of utter and adorable bemusement. He’s put it all on properly, but there’s something off, and once I realize what it is I have to bite back a laugh. When he puts his arms out at his sides, the sleeves of his kimono hang rather loosely, like ours.

“That’s very…flattering in the hips,” Yun says with an eyebrow cocked so high it’s liable to disappear into her hair. “And the bust.”

I tilt my head. “Somehow it looks better on you than me, how’s that possible?” Damn svelte Water Tribe physiques.

“I think maybe Rei forgot to tell the tailor I was a man.”

Right on cue, Rei slides our door open without the slightest knock and casts a quick gaze over us before nodding in what I assume is approval. We do look nice, after all. “Shall we?”

“Um, not to sound ungrateful or anything, but is there a reason you got me a woman’s kimono?” Nanuq asks.

She gives him another look over and chews on the inside of her cheek. “I could only get a discounted rate from the seamstress if they were all of the same cut. My stipend is…not generous enough to have bought them at their full price. I apologize.”

His confusion melts in an instant, and he closes the distance between them with a few quick, stilted steps before pulling her into a hug. “No, it’s beautiful, Rei. Really. Thank you.”

Good, everyone’s getting along. I fix Nanuq’s kimono so he can move properly, although the swishy little way he had to walk wasn’t entirely unappealing. He’s also done his hair up in a topknot, but the sages can deal with my braid. Yun’s hair is simply too short to do anything with. “I think we’re ready, then.”

Ikeda is doing her rounds, but we’re able to get her to lead us back out of the palace. Honestly, I don’t know how anyone manages to find their way around this place. “Ai said you were bringing your bison back here, I’ll have the old landing pad lit up for you. And I’ll tell the stable master that it’s not a snack for the dragons.”

“Please do,” Yun says quickly. “And she eats hay and fruits, not…whatever it is dragons eat.”

She leaves us at the entrance hall, and the sun’s starting to set by the time we finally walk outside. I have to admit, I’m a little interested to see what’s going to happen at the Dragonfire Temple. There was the Southern Air Temple and Shudan, but before this whole Avatar business I was never a very spiritual person. I’m still not, really. I’ve met a few, I’ve even got one sharing my body, but it’s hard to get out of the mindset of only trying to survive.

Yun threads our fingers together and smiles up at me. Well. There’s more to life than surviving, clearly. I take Nanuq’s arm and tug him a little closer on my other side. Much more.

“How’s this going to work, Rei?” I ask. “Should I start bending things until they’re convinced I am who I say I am? That’s what I did at the Southern Air Temple.”

“I hope that will not be necessary, but I do not know. You are the first Avatar I have escorted here. I sent ahead word of your arrival, so the High Sage should meet us when we arrive.”

“This is the new one, right?” Yun asks. “The one they were electing when we first got to Shudan?”

Rei nods. “His Eminence, High Sage Ryu. Saburou told me all our votes were cast for him. I know little of the man.”

“Well, you all work for me, so it shouldn’t be too bad.”

She rolls her eyes, but says nothing to that. This part of Kasai really is lovely—well, for a city without many earthbenders, that is. The buildings in Seizhon could change as often as the weather. It’s very well-lit, though. Workers are lighting lampposts on the sides of the roads before it gets too dark to see, and lightning bugs are swarming around the small, sweet-smelling shrubs scattered about. Still, I can’t help but remembering that the rest of the city is much less well-off.

There’s actually a bounce in Rei’s step when we arrive at the temple, another walled-off building split between one large central section and a similar, smaller wing on each side. Come to think of it, most of the private estates we passed were laid out in much the same way. Must be a theme. Dragonfire Temple is in the same style as Shudan, a pagoda with increasingly smaller tiers, though this temple has eight instead of five, and it looks to be veneered in onyx or granite rather than white gold. It cuts a much more intimidating silhouette against the northern mountain with its roosting dragons than Shudan. Good thing I stayed there.

The guards take one look at me and step to the side so we can pass. I could get used to that. Past the gate, a large courtyard dominates and a few old men are assembled there, Fire Sages to look at them. I’m so glad Rei doesn’t bother with those silly hats, I couldn’t take her seriously if she did. The robes of the one in the middle are trimmed in white and have a slightly higher collar than the others, to say nothing of the blood-red bauble hanging on a chain around his neck. Rei bows as we approach, and we do the same. They stay still, their expressions unreadable.

“High Sage Ryu,” Rei says, still half-bowed in obeisance. He almost seems surprised at being addressed by her. “May I present the Avatar, Lady Kyoshi of Chikyu.”

“You have to stop calling me that,” I mumble.

Ryu bows stiffly after a moment, as do the others. Not exactly the warm reception we got at the palace. “Avatar Kyoshi,” Ryu says in a smoke-touched voice not unlike Rei’s, “welcome to the Dragonfire Temple. Please, come with us. Your friends will have to wait outside for your accession, the temple sanctum is only for Fire Sages and Avatars.”

Rei blinks, and we all glance at her. “I…I _am_ a Fire Sage, Your Eminence. Takarabe, from the Shudan Temple. The one training Kyoshi in her firebending.”

“Nuns aren’t Fire Sages, you should’ve been told this,” he says.

She starts to open her mouth to reply a few times, but doesn’t say anything for a long moment. I do. I stalk up to them and grab the collar of Ryu’s nice crisp robes. “Rei’s vote was for you, like the rest of her temple,” I say through a growl. “Does she only count when you can get something from her? She’s the one doing the work, not hiding behind walls and guards all day. I’d rather go and get my tongue-lashing from the Earth Sages, _Your Eminence_.”

I shove him back a bit, and he falls onto the seat of his fancy robes as I turn away. “Let’s go. We’re done here.”

Rei’s still quiet as we head toward the docks, as are Yun and Nanuq. They’ve never seen me get really angry, and I don’t like it myself. Children cry and run away when I get mad. I tell them I need a minute, and they wait obligingly by the side of the main road while I keep this oncoming headache from happening. Rei seems very interested in the ground, and doesn’t say anything all the way back to the harbor.

Kasai at night, from the air, is a complex web of lights shining from streets and homes as the day winds down. Bima seems happy, but she’s the only one. Nanuq puts an arm around Rei and holds her at his side, and she lets a few tears slip through when she thinks we’re not looking.

Ikeda’s kept her word, and the landing pad is illuminated by shrouded torches on all sides. She’s even there to help translate and tell the stable master that Bima is definitely not dragon food. Yun’s very clear about that part before the stable hands lead her off for a good grooming.

“We’ll probably be having some sake and a few bouts tonight in the throne room, if you’re interested in stopping by,” our guard captain says as she falls in next to me on the way back to our rooms. She looks at my nice kimono. “Might want to dress down a little.”

“I’ll try and make it,” I tell her, and she drifts off from our group, presumably to get that set up. The route back to our rooms is a little clearer now, and I manage to get us there with only a minimum of backtracking. Rei doesn’t bother to slide the door shut after trudging into her room and sinking onto her bed. “I’ll be in soon,” I say to Yun and Nanuq, and slip in after our Fire Sage.

“This is a poor time for a proposition,” Rei says in a wavering voice as she undoes her topknot and lets her sleek black hair spill out over her shoulders.

“We _are_ friends, Rei, whether or not that’s all we’ll ever be. You’re obviously upset and I want to help.”

“Please go away, Kyoshi.” She gets up and turns her back to me while she unclasps her robe and lets it fall haphazard to the floor, leaving her in only her pants and an undershirt. Her burns are bright and angry.

“You don’t want to talk about it?”

“What is there to talk about?” Rei asks, glancing back to look at me with reddened eyes. “Most of the servants at Shudan resent my promotion, Saburou and the others there do little more than tolerate me most days, and now my higher superiors refuse to acknowledge me at all. They burned me—they _scarred_ me—and I live in pain every day because they thought I could be useful, and now they do little better than suffer my presence after realizing my talents extend only so far.”

“Rei…”

Her jaw sets in a hard line as I walk over and pull her into an embrace. That’s one advantage of being so much bigger than my friends, I give the best hugs. “They wanted me, I never asked to become a sage,” she mumbles into the folds of my kimono. “I was content with being a servant.”

“We know what a good sage you are, Rei. And we love you. The rest of them are fools not to see it just because you’re a woman.”

She hugs me back, and I’m left wondering about her muddled status. Nearly two thirds of the court we saw today were women and the Fire Lord is a woman, so why is the clergy so different? I know Rei told us she was the only female Fire Sage, but she really must be the first, like Muryo said. “Sometimes I wonder how my life would have been different had I been a man instead,” she says with a mirthless chuckle.

“You could always see if Nanuq’s willing to let you jump into his body again.”

A real laugh this time, or the closest thing she makes to one. It’s a long time before she eases back with one last squeeze and goes to finish getting undressed. “I am not quite that curious. You wanted to know why I have such an…affinity for Avatar Yangchen?”

“I’ll admit to a polite curiosity.”

Rei goes over to the water bowl on her wardrobe and starts salving her burns. “As I said, most of the others were less than pleased with my promotion, and the other sages never quite stopped seeing me as a jumped-up servant with a particular talent. I spent most of my early time as a sage in the hawkery managing messages to and from the other temples, or in the archives, organizing and translating.”

“How many languages do you speak?” I ask.

“Hitennese, Chikyan, and Western Tochi, which is more or less a dialect of Hitennese at this point. The biographies of Yangchen were the most extensive and recent, and it was…it was heartening, to have so much to read about another woman in a role that many people thought should have been filled by a man. I suppose my less idealistic interest in her grew out of that.”

She puts on a nightshirt with a sharp sigh and goes to climb into bed. “So now you know.”

“Thank you for telling me.” I might have to skip over Kuruk when I finally get the hang of manifesting my past lives.

“Goodnight, Kyoshi,” she says. “And…thank you, for defending me. I will not be dragging you off to any more temples.”

“Of course. Goodnight, Rei.”

The candle on her nightstand goes out when she balls her hand into a fist, and I slide her door shut behind me. Yun and Nanuq are already asleep, or almost there, and for a lingering moment I wish I didn’t have so much stress to work off. Quietly, I change into a lighter tunic and pants, wipe my face paint away, and kiss them both lightly before going back out into the hall. Ikeda’s come from somewhere, I don’t know how someone so obviously muscled can move so quickly and quietly. I stomp around like an ostrich horse most of the time unless I’m trying to be careful. Her guard uniform is gone, replaced by a simple red and black vest that’s open as far down as the bottom of her ribcage. “I might start thinking you like me if you keep showing up like this, Captain.”

“Sorry, I prefer my women shorter than me,” she says, but it doesn’t stop her from looking me up and down and letting her gaze linger on my hips. “Of course, I’m open to making exceptions…thought you could use some help finding the place. It’s a good chance to go over the rules with you, too. Can’t have you accidentally killing my guards.”

“I used to fight professionally, I’ve got a little self-control.”

“Oh, I don’t doubt it,” she says as we walk the halls. “But this isn’t some Chikyan pit fight, I need everyone ready to get up in the morning and go back to their jobs. Try not to break any bones, and no bending. Have to keep it fair for us regular people. Well, as fair as it can be against someone as big as you.”

“Simple enough.”

They’ve actually repurposed a smaller space just off the throne room, one that looks like it would let less noise carry than the vaulted ceilings and open stretches the court proper uses. I recognize a few of the people there as guards, one or two of the younger courtiers, and more that might be cooks or groundskeepers or other servants. A few eyebrows go up as we walk in, and Ikeda juts her head at me. “Kyoshi. The Avatar.”

“What’s she need bending for?” one of the guards asks. “She could just wring our necks!”

“You’re usually all over any newcomers, Hane,” Ikeda says. “Don’t worry Yoshi, we’ll find someone dumb enough to fight you. Go get yourself wrapped up over there.”

“ _Yoshi_?” That’s almost as bad as my given name.

“Easier to pronounce with a bloody nose and a split lip, trust me. Watch a few fights first, get a feel for the pace of it, then we’ll get you a good matchup.”

I go ahead and wrap some clean bandages around my hands and forearms. Split knuckles are one of the worst feelings I can think of. Once I make sure my braid is nice and tight, I find myself a seat while two of the women I haven’t met yet go to the center of the room. Ikeda’s near them, arms folded, ready to jump in if need be. “Okay Ayane, Misato, you know the rules, keep it light on the face, and if one of you puts the other out of commission you’ve got to cover her shift. Have fun.”

They bow quickly to one another, then take up stances I’m not familiar with. Maybe they’re both nonbenders. Before I can ask, they go racing toward each other and explode in a storm of punches and blocks, attacks and counterattacks, high kicks and guards. One of them twists and dips around every incoming hit after a few moments, twirling like she’s about to start airbending in a beautiful, dizzying display. Her opponent tries to trip her up with a few wide mid-height sweeps, probably what I’d do if Yun and I started going at it, but she manages to jump over each one.

“Damn,” I whisper. One of the courtiers next to me nods. Good to see they’re not all uselessly formal.

“Ayane’s great at this,” she says as the woman in question ducks under a straight-armed punch. “All those upfront strikes at the beginning are stalls and feints, and then she starts with the spirals after she wears you down.”

It certainly seems to be working for her, and her knuckles go flying into Misato’s back. She tenses up a split second before her arms go limp at her sides, and Ayane pushes her down onto her back without resistance. One finger rests on Misato’s shoulder, almost taunting in its impudence, and Ikeda counts to three before Ayane steps away to some quick, hollering applause. She runs her hand through a lock of her hair that came free of her topknot and steps out of the central space for a glass of waiting sake. Ayane drains half of it in one long gulp, then splashes some of the rest on a fresh cut along the front of her shoulder. I can almost feel the sting myself.

There are a few more bouts, and after an hour or two almost half the group is good and bruised up, with no ill will in sight. Quite the opposite, with all that blood pumping Ayane and Misato seem to have a hard time keeping their hands off each other after their match. Money changes hands with wagers, the sake flows in between the rounds…not a bad way to spend a night.

“All right, Yoshi,” Ikeda says, grabbing my arm and pulling me up to my feet, “your turn.”

“So who am I fighting?”

She strips off her vest and flings it toward some of the other guards, leaving her bare from the waist up apart from her chest wraps, the hard sculpt of muscle I knew she had under there, and a smirk. “Me.”


	27. Midnight Sojourn

“So you’re the only one dumb enough to fight me?”

Ikeda pushes back her hair and ties a thick band around her forehead to keep the sweat out of her eyes. “No, just the only one who knows she can win against you,” she says with a dismissive wave of her hand toward the crowd. I shrug out of the top half of my kimono and tie the arms around my waist.

“You don’t lack confidence, that’s for sure…I never asked, is Ikeda a given or family name?”

“Maybe I’ll tell you if you win,” she says, and drops her stance. So that’s how it’s going to be. All right, it’s good to keep things interesting with a friendly wager. Of course, any semblance of friendliness is gone from her eyes, and she’s slipped from the calm, collected guard captain to the fighter running on instinct. Time to join the party.

One of the guards that managed to avoid a bloody lip in her fight counts down, and then Ikeda closes the distance between us with short, agile steps. I don’t have the frame to match her speed, so I keep my body turned slightly to present less of a target while I watch her move. She’s looking for openings, same as me, but I can’t get her to fall for any of my usual feints. Too smart for that. I’ll have to force some kind of response. I throw a jab squarely at her jaw, but rather than duck or sweep to one side, she tucks her head down and takes the hit on her forehead. All right, that’s a new one. My knuckles strike right below her hairline and a sting runs up my hand, but I don’t have time to draw it back before she takes advantage of the opening and sends one fist flying into my side.

I can almost feel the ribs starting to bruise. How did she take that hit and stay cogent enough to counterattack? This could get interesting…Ikeda keeps shifting her balance from foot to foot and making it hard to find an opening. If she’d rather push into my strikes, there’s not much I can do to get her to dodge, but I get free hits on her, too.

Her gaze flits down to my foot when I throw it forward, but instead of trying to trip her up I yank it back and use the momentum to swing into her shoulder. In an instant her arm falls limp at her side, and her whole upper body reels to the left from the impact. There are a few cheers from the crowd, but they’re quickly drowned out by boos. Ikeda’s the popular one here. The faint smells of sweat and blood are all over the room now, and in the thick of it it’d be easy to let myself get swept away by the frenzy clawing inside me.

One split second of inattention is all she needs, and with her good arm she strikes up against my jaw. My vision starts spotting as I stagger, and by the time I’ve shaken my head clear and put my guard back up her right arm looks fine, or at least functional. Palace guard training must really be something else. I don’t want to hurt her, she has a job to go back to, but I don’t like losing, either. I hate it, as a matter of fact.

Duck, weave, dodge, duck again—Ikeda seems happy to put me through my paces without pressing me. Is she just that good, or am I really this bad without my bending? Maybe I can learn something here. Her fist comes toward my stomach with enough tilt on it to dodge, but I tense up instead and take the hit. Ikeda’s eyes widen the instant before she connects, and it looks like I’ve finally caught her unawares. Her hit stings, but not enough to get more than a little ripple of pain across my skin. Before she can draw back and rethink her strategy, my arm clamps down to trap hers, and then it’s a simple matter to grab the top of her pants and pick her right up.

“Maybe you _were_ the only one dumb enough to—”

Her knee crashes into the side of my face. All right, that’s my fault, gloating before I’ve won. I can feel blood pouring from my nose as I bring her down on the mat. Not hard, I know how to soften the impact and keep from really hurting her, but firmly enough to tell her not to get back up. I’m not sure the message gets across, so I plant my knee right below the middle of her collarbone.

Our tiny crowd is mixed in their reactions once our official reluctantly counts off again and calls the match for me. Some of the courtiers cheer, most of the guards look less than thrilled, and quite a few people who put bets on Ikeda are crumpling their hastily-written tickets and commiserating with the remaining sake bottles. It’s nice to see one of the cooks bet on me and looks ready to clean up. As least someone has some faith in their Avatar. Right now I wish someone had a cloth or a rag for their Avatar, though. The bottom half of my face is mostly red, and I don’t want to have to ask Nanuq to bend any blood out of my one good kimono.

“Do you normally push through the hits like that?” I ask as I extend a hand. Ikeda takes it, all the fury gone from her eyes, and shrugs once I pull her up to her feet.

“Sometimes. We’re trained to get between the Fire Lord and threats, it sticks with you. Didn’t expect that you’d turn it back on me, even if you’re built for it.”

We go back over to the sidelines and I can finally get myself cleaned up. Ikeda’s got a mean knee, and it takes most of the next bout between Misato and Genji, the cook who had the good sense to bet on me, for my nose to stop bleeding. Ikeda curls up to my side in the meantime, and a few glasses of sake later I notice she’s not paying nearly as much attention to the fights as the fresh bruises on my stomach, poking lightly around the splotches. Hmm…Yun, Nanuq and I didn’t ever discuss these kinds of situations. Not that I had any plans to seduce my way through the Fire Nation—nor did I have any expectations that I could, I’ve never thought of myself as particularly attractive—but I should probably close this off before anyone does anything untoward.

She seems a bit put out when I shift over in my seat and put my kimono back on. “I guess I should’ve found out if you were interested in women first,” she says quietly.

“Oh, I like everyone. But I’m spoken for.”

“The cheery little Fire Sage?”

Not unless I suddenly manifest Yangchen. I shake my head. “The airbender?” Ikeda asks. “Not the Water Tribe boy?”

“Mmhmm.”

“Which?”

“Both,” I tell her as I get up. The sake’s starting to hit me, but I can see her cock one eyebrow.

“Avatar’s prerogative, I guess…had enough for your first time?”

I nod, which unfortunately sets the room awhirl, and Ikeda has to jump up to keep me from taking out a table. “Yeah, I think that’s about all you can handle. I don’t want to be responsible for whatever a drunk earthbender’s liable to do, much less the Avatar. Come on, you.”

Ikeda puts her vest back on and guides me out of the room with a respectfully formal hand on the small of my back. A shoulder wouldn’t be unappreciated, but I don’t think I’d lean on her so much as knock her over, and we make it back to the guest wing without too much stumbling on my part.

“All right, there you go,” she says. “Ah, Kyoshi?”

“Mm?” Words are hard now. Small hums of acknowledgement are all she gets.

“Out of curiosity, if you weren’t…in whatever arrangement you’re in with those two, would you still have pulled away?”

I shake my head and kiss her lightly on the cheek. Whatever parts of her face that weren’t already red are getting there quickly, and she mumbles a quick goodnight before hurrying back to the throne room. Cute. I take a moment to get my balance back, slide the door open, and slip inside.

⁂

“Get up.”

The voice barely registers before something very wet and very cold splashes on my face. I thrash away from it, coughing and sputtering my throat dry as my eyes fly open in a panic. Nothing seems out of place in the low candlelight apart from an annoyed Rei, nothing’s on fire and no one’s breaking in—

Oh. Rei.

“This isn’t my room, is it?”

“Surmised that, have you?” she asks through her usual rasp. I bend all the water away and drop it into a basin on the wardrobe. “Now why did you cuddle me?”

Wow, I was really drunk. And now I’m starting to feel it. “I walked into the wrong room, it was just instinct. Holding things when I sleep makes me feel safe. You don’t like cuddling or something?”

Her expression falters for a moment, and some color rises in her cheeks. “That is not the point,” Rei says in a low voice. “You stumbled in with dried blood all over your face, stinking of alcohol, and you collapsed into my bed and _cuddled_ me. It woke me up, but your grip is like iron, and I was only just able to wriggle myself free. I realize your other teachers have been more than happy to match your advances, but you have quite a full bed across the hall, and I prefer to sleep alone and untouched. Cuddling is for after making love, having someone chafing against my burns makes it impossible for me to sleep.”

“All right, all right, I’m sorry. It was a mistake.”

Rei chews on her lip for a moment, then nods and opens her door. “I accept your apology. Sunrise is not for another hour or so, go and be with your lovers. Doubtless we will be expected at breakfast, so sleep lightly.”

No chance of that. I climb out of her bed and go to the door, but not before I offer her a hug. She accepts, to my surprise, but only briefly, and I lean down until I’m right beside her ear. “No more mistaking rooms. I know you like a subtler seduction.”

“Go to bed, Kyoshi. And brush your teeth, I could get drunk from your breath.”

I think I’d like to see drunk Rei, maybe she uses contractions and cracks a smile every now and then. She slides her door shut in no uncertain terms and I can hear her padding back to bed. I should do something nice for her, I did drunkenly barge into her inviolate space and nuzzle her. Maybe when my head isn’t starting to pound.

One of the candles in my room is burning low, and I can see that Yun and Nanuq have long since gone to bed. I don’t have the luxury of moving around quietly, but I do try and keep from making more noise than necessary as I undress, let my hair out, and nudge them apart so I can take my usual spot in the middle. Good thing too, Nanuq is stiff against my leg as they nestle in against me and that might’ve rattled Yun. I play with his hair for a bit before the shock of the water wears off and my eyelids start getting heavy. Guard captains and annoyed Fire Sages seem especially prevalent in the dreams that are clear enough to recall later.

The sun is doing its best to filter in through our shrouded windows the next time I wake up, and it’s light enough to see that I only made it halfway through the changing process before I got into bed. My usual nightclothes are still folded neatly on the wardrobe across the room, easily visible over a still-dozing Yun. Oh well, Fire Nation nights are warm enough to go without clothes. I stretch out with a long yawn and try to work the kinks out of my body. “Too much sake…way too much sake. I wonder if waterbending healing can deal with drink sickness.”

“Well, I’ve never tried it on sake, but you can make a pretty strong decoction from kava leaves. Seleq loves it, not so much the headache the next morning.”

Nanuq is leaning against the doorway to the bathroom and trying very hard to be respectful and keep his gaze fixed on my face. I make his job a little more difficult and prop myself up on one elbow. “All that fighting and drinking last night caught up with me. It’s fine to look, you know. I want you to. You can even touch, if you like. Come here.”

The bed hardly shifts when he lies down beside me, but he shudders a bit when I undo the fastenings on his usual vest and run my hand along the small, pronounced ridge of his collarbone. He’s so warm…one of his hands brushes lightly, tentatively, along my shoulder and eventually down along to the swell of one breast. From a distance I can pass as Water Tribe, but Nanuq’s skin is quite a bit darker, and I love seeing the contrast up close, with him against me. I slip my hand out of his vest and down to his leg, drifting up to the heavy stiffness that starts straining in my hand. “Feels much better here than poking me in the thigh.”

He makes such adorable faces as I toy with him through his pants, shifting my hand slowly up and down. I’m surprised at how fierce his kisses become, his lips almost crashing into mine every time I squeeze a little more or press my body into his hands. Poor boy, so pent up. His hips buck in counter to my motions, like he’s trying to finish himself in my hand. The thought sends a sharp, hot twitch running up from between my legs—

Someone knocks on the door, so I know it can’t be Rei. I growl, and Nanuq falls still in disappointment. Reluctantly, I let go of his cock and sit myself up with a grimace. Can’t an Avatar get a few minutes’ peace? I blow some hair out of my face as I start for the door. “Kyoshi…”

“I’ll be right back.”

“No, your clothes are still on the floor.”

Right, I’m not wearing anything but my fresh bruises. I’m tempted to stay that way and simply stare down any early morning interlopers, but I pull on my kimono, probably inside out, before sliding the door open. Somehow Ikeda’s managed to conceal the fact that she spent all night fighting and drinking apart from a tiny spot of dried blood at the corner of her mouth. “Your timing couldn’t be worse, captain. I’m in the middle of some very delicate negotiations with one of the Water Tribes.”

She leans to the side to look into my room, to the bed. “I see that. Not to intrude, but—how was I supposed to say this—Her Imperial Majesty would be much obliged if her honored guests would join her and her family for breakfast on the west terrace in an hour’s time.”

My stomach rumbles at the thought. Fighting and drinking has a way of working up the appetite. “That sounds fine, I need some food. I’ll collect everyone and make sure we’re there.”

“Good, that was a mouthful to remember,” she says with no small relief. “I’ll let them know. And I…I wanted to apologize again about last night. All the blood gets pumping, everyone’s drunk, it’s a very charged atmosphere.”

“You don’t have to apologize.” I take a step forward and lay one hand on the end of her tachi. “If I wasn’t already involved twice over I don’t think we would’ve gotten much farther than the mat.”

Her blush stays around her nose rather than spreading to her cheeks. “That’s…good to know,” Ikeda says in a suddenly hoarse voice. “I don’t suppose there’s any more room in that bed, is there?”

“Sorry,” I say. Rei’s coming down the hall from the small shrine we passed on the way in, humming softly to herself as she goes by. “Fourth spot’s reserved.”

She nods and steps back. “The west terrace is behind the throne room, we went through it to get to the garden yesterday. I’ll be doing my rounds if you need directions. Oh—and it’s Shiori.”

“Hmm?”

“You asked about my name. Ikeda’s the family name, mine is Shiori.”

“It’s lovely.”

Nanuq’s in the middle of some deep breaths when I slip back into our room after informing Rei of our itinerary. “State breakfast, we should probably get ready,” I say, and reach over to nudge Yun awake.

“All right, I could do with a good meal.” He shifts his way off the bed with a twinge of discomfort. “Maybe some ice, too.”

I open the front of my kimono and pull him into a long, deep hug. “I’ll make it up to you.”

“Maybe tonight?”

“Ah, tonight…tonight might be a problem. I sort of promised the Fire Lord I’d kidnap her. Maybe you want to help me? She really needs a healer all the time.”

He looks up at me for a moment, or does the best he can considering he’s squished up against my chest. “Well, it’s just not a vacation until you’ve committed a capital crime…is there any particular reason she wants to be kidnapped?”

“Muryo seemed genuinely surprised when I told her the state most of Hitenno is in. I think that chancellor of hers has been keeping the truth hidden from her, she wants to see more of Kasai for herself. I wanted you to take a look at her anyway, whatever healing Kania’s giving her is unpredictable,” I say in a lower tone. “She seized up on me yesterday when we were alone. So?”

“Of course I’ll help you, Kyoshi. Did you really think I wouldn’t?” Nanuq asks with a tilted eyebrow. “I would’ve said yes even if you weren’t smooshing your tits into my face.”

“Never hurts to stack the deck.” I do release him, though. “I’ll let you know the details when I get them. Thanks for helping.”

“Helping with what?”

Yun’s picked about the worst time to wake up, though I guess we weren’t going to be able to spirit away the empress without her catching wind of it. “One or two tiny counts of treason,” I say as I turn to her. Whatever sleepiness is still written on her face vanishes when she sees my kimono is open. “The Fire Lord wanted to go on a little trip through the city, Nanuq and I were going to escort her.”

“I’ll keep Bima ready in case that goes badly,” Yun says through a long yawn.

“Actually, there was something else I was hoping you could do.”

Once we all get washed up and dressed in our nice clothes—and Nanuq bends some ice for himself, poor thing—we gather Rei and head for breakfast. This whole plan needs to be carefully executed, a trap that ensnares so slowly the victim doesn’t even notice, so naturally Nanuq thought up most of it. Yun doesn’t have a conniving bone in her body and I have all the subtlety of a rabid badgermole, but he’s been learning statecraft since he was little, watching his mother deftly keep the tenuous balance of peace between their tribe and their much more powerful neighbors.

“So, Rei,” Yun says as we walk through the tapestry room, “Kyoshi tells me you’re fascinated with Avatar Yangchen.”

My exact words were more along the lines of _Rei has the biggest and weirdest crush on Yangchen_ , but the point stands. She stiffens up even more than her usual stance, if that’s possible. “I have an interest in preserving the scholarship of a fascinating woman, yes. What of it?”

“Did she ever tell you that Yangchen was my great-great-aunt?”

And now her interest is piqued. I knew Yun’s lineage would come in handy eventually. Rei takes a step closer to her, and Nanuq and I continue quietly leading our group through the larger doors to the throne room. They must open them up sometimes to let the place air out. “No, Kyoshi never mentioned that.”

Yun takes off her necklace and rolls some of the beads over her fingers. “This was her pendant, as a matter of fact…would you like to hold it?”

Rei’s practically straining not to reach out and take it before Yun offers it to her. She does, and Rei whimpers with excitement before almost walking into a column. I nudge her back on course and we get to the west terrace, the shrouded little spot favored by the bonsai artisans, where a table’s been set up for Muryo and her immediate family.

“Ah, Kyoshi!” the Fire Lord says in a tired voice from her space at the low table. “Rei, Yun, Nanuq—I hope I pronounced that properly—thank you so much for joining us. Please, I saved you some spots over here. And I don’t believe I had the chance to introduce you to my family yesterday, did I?”

No sooner have we sat down at the spaces to her left than she starts throwing a dizzying number of names at us. Her half-brothers Hyōbu and Hachiro are actually quite a few years older than her, but she took precedence since they’re the children of the last Fire Lord’s concubine and she isn’t. Hachiro, the younger prince, has only the one wife and a single son, Koremitsu. Cute little round-faced boy. On the other hand, Hyōbu has a whole brood that I’ll never be able to remember, so I only smile and bow slightly as I’m introduced. There are the three children with his first and very pregnant wife Sei, his daughter Tizei and her younger brothers Zhun and Rozu, the infant Prince Zenji with his second wife Fujitsubo, and finally his son Lu with his third wife Shikibu. The children have their own wing of the table where they can play and talk with each other, and Hachiro and his wife Murasaki seem affectionate, but Hyōbu’s wives are a little colder to one another. Marital bliss, indeed…the Fire Lord’s mother Kuri is a few spaces down from her daughter beside Jia, the last Fire Lord’s concubine and the mother of the two elder princes, and finally Kania is on Muryo’s right.

“Quite a clan,” I say when she’s through pointing everyone out.

“And that’s not counting my half-sisters and my uncle. Do you have a large family, Kyoshi?” Muryo asks as some servants start bringing out rice for everyone. “I can’t imagine how they would react to you being the Avatar.”

“I have two older brothers as well, but—I’m sorry, Your Majesty. Family is something of a sore point for most of us. I think Nanuq here is the only one with a good relationship with his.”

“I’ve got an older brother _and_ older sisters!” he says from the seat to my left. Yun stays quiet at the mention of family, and Rei is still engrossed in turning over Yangchen’s pendant in her hands.

“Oh, of course. I didn’t mean to stir up anything unpleasant.”

Too late on that account. Fen and Yang and Ling…my brothers’ faces come swimming, unbidden and unwelcome, into my mind. They never got tired of torturing their dumb, awkward sister. Suddenly the hunger in my stomach gives over to nausea, and I have to squeeze Nanuq’s arm to keep myself grounded in the present. He looks so silly in his oddly-cut kimono, but he drops his chopsticks immediately and turns my way when he sees something is wrong. “Kyoshi?” he asks in a hushed voice. “What’s the matter?”

“Bad memories.” I let go of his arm and trace the edge of his cheek. Nanuq won’t hurt me. I know he won’t. I shake my head clear. “Think nothing of it, Your Majesty.”

“Muryo, please,” she chides gently.

I nod. “This is a lovely morning for breakfast outside, did it rain last night?”

“Only a morning shower,” Kania says. “Enough to leave a light morning dew, no more.”

She recites some old poem about dew that delights Muryo but leaves her out of breath. When she’s recovered and Kania is speaking with Kuri a few spaces down, she leans a bit closer to me. “I do hope you and your friends are enjoying Kasai,” she says in a voice so soft I can barely hear her. “Perhaps you’ve seen a few places you might show to someone interested in seeing the city?”

“Nanuq and I have some spots in mind,” I say. “Midnight would be a good time for a tour, I think.”

“Oh my, so late…very well. I know I can trust Captain Ikeda, she’ll make the necessary arrangements.”

She seems to be quite a busy woman around here. I wonder if she’s in charge of all the palace guards, she never mentioned any superiors apart from the political types. “Chancellor Hebi couldn’t join us this morning?” I ask.

“Grandfather is still in his prayers at the Dragonfire Temple, he should return within the hour.”

That seems like a very serious snub, going to a temple over an empress’s breakfast, but the dynamics of power here are strange and not something I care to puzzle out right this minute. I have some time to enjoy the food after making our plans, apart from Hyōbu and Hachiro insisting I teach them how to say _yes_ and _no_ in Chikyan. “It really depends on the question,” I tell them, but that doesn’t seem to be a very satisfying answer. The rest of breakfast passes with only a minimum of squabbling among the children, and the chancellor indeed returns near the end of the third course, hovering near the door like an insistent shadow. Kania excuses herself and they disappear into the antechamber between the throne room and the terrace before she, and only she, returns to collect the Fire Lord.

Her departure seems to indicate the impending court session, and her brothers head off with their families shortly after, leaving only our party and Muryo’s mother quietly sipping her tea a few seats down. She hasn’t said much of anything all morning apart from a conversation with Kania and a few snippets of poetry she exchanged with Jia—what is this fascination the nobility has with poetry, honestly—but now she seems quicker to acknowledge us with a small nod.

“Lady Kuri, I’m curious,” I say as I turn to her.

“Perhaps I can satisfy your curiosity, Your Holiness.”

I hate that title, but if anyone was going to use it, it would be her. The empress dowager is a very stately woman, without a single hair on her head or stitch on her kimono out of place. The cuff of her right sleeve, on her writing hand, is folded back once as seems to be the fashion for court ladies, even though I’d put money on the scribes being the only ones to write anything. A few wrinkles and a loose braid of silken black hair frame her large amber eyes as she turns to look at me.

“Kania. Her duties seem to extend well beyond healing. I was wondering if she has some official title.”

“She _would_ be the highest-ranking Water Tribe native in the Hitennese government,” Nanuq chimes in.

“The songbird with its eggs in many nests weathers well its hungry predators.” Kuri looks sagely at me, but her expression drops somewhat when she sees her reference just isn’t landing. Why can’t these people speak plainly? “No, Lady Kania has no title, and furnishing her with one would only invite questions as to why it went to her and not a native of Hitenno. Within the imperial registrar, she is listed as the sole handmaiden to the Fire Lord, but anyone could see that her duties extend well beyond drawing my daughter’s baths or brushing out her hair. Giving this responsibility to a Tayagun woman, and a lowborn one at that, has invited some criticism, but…do you have any children, Avatar Kyoshi?”

“None, I’m not yet twenty. But I think I might like to, one day.”

I can feel Nanuq shuffle closer to me at that, and I squeeze his hand. Kuri nods, a bit wistful. “Then I pray you never have the ill fortune to outlive your children. My husband and I buried our two oldest, he abdicated out of grief, and now Muryo is all I have left besides Azui and Kizei’s shrines. So as long as Kania can stave off whatever sickness has seized my daughter, as long as she can be her friend, I will make sure she has a place here, title or no.”

“Of course. Thank you for indulging me.”

She drifts off to the garden after a short bow, leaving us alone. Rei seems to have come back to reality, mostly, only to start interrogating Yun for everything she knows about Yangchen. Nanuq is picking absently at his rice. “So do you think about kids a lot?”

“Well, not right now. I’d like a little time for…not having kids first. And don’t you think you might be getting ahead of yourself?”

“Still.” He takes a sip of his sake and looks out to the garden, where Kuri’s gone to sit with one of the smaller, younger dragons lolling about at the edge of the lake. “Something to keep in mind.”

Personally I think he’s putting the cart well before the ostrich horse as far as this conversation goes, but…well. “Come on, Yun. Dangle that pendant and drag Rei along, we should see what’s going on at court today.”

I regret saying that almost as soon as it starts. The entire affair is so mind-numbing that it’s all I can do to keep from falling asleep right there in the throne room. At least today we took seats in the last row, where it’s easier to make fun of all the nonsense they prattle on about. Members of this rank can wear this and members of that rank can petition such and such class of bureaucrat, and on and on and on. Hitennese government seems out of all proportion to the size of their empire, such that it is. I’ll never know where they got imperial pretensions when Chikyu is so much larger and content as a monarchy.

About the best part of court is it ending. Muryo says something I can’t really hear from all the way in the back, but it starts dispersing courtiers. Not a moment too soon. There’s a quick tap on my shoulder that makes me start in my seat. Ayane looks very different in a guard uniform, though her collar doesn’t quite cover up all the love bites on her neck. She stuffs a note into my hand and hurries back to her post.

_The little walk I’m told you’re planning is treasonous and incredibly stupid. Happy to help. I’ll come collect you around midnight when things are clear. And you owe me a rematch for this. –Shiori_

It’s a hot, hazy kind of day, and Nanuq and I catch a nap while Yun and Rei take Bima for a long flight. We may as well get the sleep now. It’s too warm to really indulge the stiff length of cock resting against my thigh, and Nanuq doesn’t press the issue, but I can move in gentle counter to the roll of his hips and provide a little friction, a little pleasure. It’ll have to do for now.

⁂

“I guess I have a few stories about her my mother would tell me before she started being awful.”

Yun’s voice carries lightly through the thin walls and door, and through their vague silhouettes I can see Rei drag her back into her room across the hall. She’ll be occupied long enough for us to slip away, then. Nanuq and I change into our more comfortable clothes—though not for lack of trying on my part to get him to wear his nice kimono and do that swishy little walk—and there’s a soft knock on our door as we finish filling our water skins. No time for face paint tonight.

“Right on time, captain,” I say as we step out into the hall.

“Always. Just you two, right? We don’t have a very big window to get you out of the palace. I held up the guards starting their shifts outside, but we need to hurry if you want to get to the carriage I left past the gates. And I’m sure this goes without saying, but—” Ikeda whips around on her heels and keeps walking backward as she turns a glare on us that could cut glass— “you bring her back safe, understand?”

We both nod.

“I know it’d be hard to get a better escort, and Kage will be shadowing you the whole time, but be careful all the same. The rest of Kasai isn’t so well-guarded.”

“That’s your sister, right?” Nanuq asks. “Have we met her?”

“One of my sisters. And no, Kage’s…not a guard,” Ikeda says quietly. Her gaze darts around to all the shadows we pass, as if she’s expecting something to appear there. “Or she is, but not the same kind as me, and not under my command. You’ve got nothing to worry about from her as long as neither of you try to kill Muryo.”

Odd, I haven’t heard anyone refer to the Fire Lord so familiarly outside of her family. Back in the main hall is a small, waifish figure sitting seiza at the shrine beneath Fire Lord Shisei’s tapestry, lighting some incense and offering a few prayers. Muryo’s tired eyes look at us from under the hood, and Ikeda goes ahead of us to help her back to her feet. I could swear I see something moving in a shadow across the room, but I don’t poke at it.

“I had my friend in the kitchens put a little extra chamomile in Kania’s tea, she won’t be getting up until the morning.”

“You didn’t hurt her, did you?” Muryo asks through a cough, her face full of concern. “I know you two aren’t the best of friends, but I don’t want her harmed.”

“She’ll be fine, Your Majesty. Maybe a little drowsy in the morning. You’ve got two hours.”

Muryo hugs her briefly, and then Ikeda returns to her post. “So, Kyoshi, Nanuq,” the Fire Lord says as she takes ahold of his arm, “shall we go?”

Ikeda’s made good on her word, and the path to the front gates is deserted. Helpful, if not exactly inspiring to see how easily one woman can bring so much security grinding to a halt. Past the gates is a sleek and gilded ostrich horse-driven carriage waiting on the abandoned street. Good thing too, at Muryo’s speed we’d never get out of the district before dawn. Nanuq lightly taps the reins against the steeds’ flanks after we climb in, and we lurch forward, away from the palace.

“How long have you known the captain?” I ask.

“Oh, yes…Shiori and Kage are my half-sisters,” Muryo explains. All right, that was unexpected. “Their mother was widowed, so she couldn’t properly be made into a concubine, but Fire Lord Azai is their father. We try to look after each other.”

This Hitennese web is getting more complex by the minute. “Nanuq, I’ll take the reins, why don’t you make sure the Fire Lord is in good health?”

“I fear you might be disappointed in that matter,” she says with forced cheeriness, but nonetheless unclasps her robe and slides it down to the tops of her breasts so Nanuq can run some water over her pallid, fragile skin. “The good health—oh, that’s quite cold—the good health went to my half-siblings.”

Nanuq hums his acknowledgement as he works, and I keep the carriage plodding along through the Imperial Quarter. There isn’t much for Muryo to see here, apart from how the gentry lives. I do point out the size of their estates, how well-maintained their gardens are, the fanciful metalwork of the fences, but my real goals are farther east still.

It’s a little ways into the Hake Quarter that I can start showing her the rest of the city. Shops with awnings in tatters, rodents and raccoons rifling through trash left piled at the sides of the streets, the people who have to go around at night to do their jobs collecting chamber pots because it’s not considered honorable work—I imagine it’s quite a change to observe. Nanuq’s moved on to working on her back, leaving Muryo free to look around while holding her robe up over her chest. We keep going.

“What happened to the streetlamps?” Muryo asks. The only light afforded us on the now-bumpy road is from the half-moon hanging heavy in the sky and the weak glow from Nanuq’s water.

“They don’t bother lighting them down here in the Teichi Quarter,” I say as I spin up some flame in my hand. Our carriage continues plodding along the uneven roads while we take in the sights, such that they are. “Strange, isn’t it? Considering most of the city lives here, in homes or not. It’s the biggest district in the city, and the poorest. We could hardly go by a single building without noticing something in need of repair when we arrived yesterday.”

We pass a group of huddled beggars, a few prostitutes, and one building that looks like it’d come down with a stiff breeze before I pull the carriage to the side of the road and give our steeds a rest. “The palace is lovely, Your Majesty, but _this_ is Kasai. This is life for most people in the capital, and there are plenty of towns and villages across the country with a similar story.”

Nanuq draws his water away, and Muryo fixes her robes with a somber, tearful expression. “They never…they never told me about any of this. My parents, my ministers, my chancellor—why would they hide this from me?”

“I don’t know how politicians think. I was a peasant who built houses and fought mock brawls for coin. All of this was how I lived on a good day, how my whole village lived. Some parts might even be nicer than Seizhon was, we weren’t near a palace.” I let her ruminate on that while I drop my tone and turn to Nanuq. “So?”

“She’s definitely sick, I couldn’t tell you what with. But it’s not only affecting one part of her body, it’s all through her chest and head and limbs. Kania’s healing should be more effective than this…I tried clearing it up around her lungs so she can breathe a little better.”

“Good, good.” I kiss him quickly on the cheek and take the reins again. “I’m sure there’s more we could see—or smell, in the case of the harbor—but Ikeda only gave us two hours and we used up plenty getting here.”

Muryo nods and takes another look around the main road. When I start turning the carriage around, I notice that we’re closed in, front and back, by several men with masks and cudgels. Bad timing all around today.

“Kyoshi?” Muryo asks.

“We’ll handle this.”

“Nice carriage,” one of the larger men says in a thick accent I can’t quite place. “You three ladies give it up without a fight and we might let you live.”

“Hey!” Nanuq says.

“You know, ordinarily I’d love the chance to cut loose and use one of you to beat the others, but we’re in a hurry. Walk away or you’ll have more wounded than your pride.”

That gets a good laugh out of them, and I’m almost perversely glad I have the chance to beat someone up, for real this time. “Keep her safe, Nanuq.”

One of the men in front takes a step toward us, only to have an arrow whistle out of the darkness and through his foot, pinning him in place. His pained yowl cuts through the quiet evening, and his companions look around wildly for the source of the attack. High angle, left side…it likely came from a rooftop immediately south of us. I guess Muryo and Ikeda’s not-a-guard sister really was along with us the whole time.

Another arrow, a warning shot, goes right by a second man’s face and tears his mask off. Now I _have_ to meet this sister, but I can’t let her have all the fun. The road’s ripped up near to uselessness, I don’t have enough water to deal with everyone, and careless firebending might burn down the whole district, but I’ve still got airbending and my fists. I jump from the carriage and come down hard on one of our assailants, planting one palm into the crook of his shoulder. It sends him to the ground where he strikes the side of his head on a loose cobblestone, and he falls still.

Our lead ostrich horse ruffles its feathers and pecks madly at one of the attackers who made the mistake of getting too close to the cagey animal with the enormous beak, which is awash in red soon enough. He runs off with a spotty trail of blood behind him. That’s three of them dealt with…the remainder look to be reconsidering their choice of target, but they can’t stay still for too long without arrows nipping at their boots.

I don’t want to take the chance that one of them might get lucky, not when we have the empress in tow, so I grab my fans and pull in as much air as I can. The wind screams around us, whipping about in a massive spiral and leaving the rest of them fighting to stay standing. It’s not a fight two of them can win, and only one doesn’t go flying into the nearby buildings. The one left standing managed to brace himself, and I’m not surprised to see it’s the man who tried to threaten us out of the carriage.

“You really picked the dumbest fight you could,” I say as I advance on him. For some reason, maybe drunken courage or a furious sense of pride, he starts toward me with his cudgel raised. Fool. He doesn’t get two steps in before another arrow lodges itself firmly in his wrist, and he staggers and screams as blood streaks his arm. His flailing sends some of it splashing on my face, and his crude weapon falls to the ground with a _thud_. I shove him aside and finally rob him of his balance, leaving the way clear for us. A vague shape on the nearest roof shifts around when I look up. “Thanks.”

Muryo’s buried herself in Nanuq’s side, where she’s shielded by the large ice spike on his arm. Neither of them move much as I climb back in and take the reins. “Everyone all right?” I ask.

“I think I’d like to go back home now.”

The ostrich horses must hate me by the time we come skittering down the palace approach, but we get there without any more excitement. Muryo is still clutching tight to Nanuq as we get her out of the carriage, but somehow she’s able to stand under her own power and keep pace with us as we sneak back in. By some miracle or truly excellent timing there aren’t any guards to see us come in from the main gates. Ikeda looks close to a conniption when she sees the blood on my face, and she nearly knocks me over in her haste to get to the Fire Lord.

“What’d you do?” she demands with a withering look. “Are you hurt, Your Majesty?”

“I’m fine, Shiori,” Muryo says in an unusually strong voice. “They didn’t do anything they shouldn’t have. There was some trouble in the Teichi Quarter, but Kyoshi and Kage were more than capable of handling it.”

Suddenly there’s another woman stepping out of a dark alcove next to the nearest shrine, one that looks remarkably like Ikeda but for her long, wiry black hair and the deep scar running from her chin to the middle of her collarbone. A yumi as tall as me and a quiver are slung over her shoulder, both finely crafted. “Everything was under control,” she says, her voice low and growling. “You have to expect some things when you go into the slums showing off that much wealth. I wouldn’t recommend doing it again.”

“Yes, and apart from that incident it was a very illuminating experience,” Muryo says. “I think some changes will have to come to Kasai, important changes…but for now I need to sleep.”

Kage melts into the shadows again, and Muryo strides off to her chambers with Ikeda close behind, leaving me and Nanuq alone under a tapestry so old most of its details are faded. “Well, that was exciting,” he says as we start back to our wing.

We know the way back by now, and it isn’t long before we’re going down the familiar hall with our rooms at the end. I bend the blood off my face as we go. “I’m sorry I dragged you into this.”

He shrugs. “You have to expect some craziness when you’re with the Avatar.”

“Why aren’t you a wreck right now?”

“I guess I could ask you the same thing,” he says with a grin as we arrive at our rooms. I open Rei’s door a crack and see her slumped against a sleeping Yun, holding tight to that pendant. “Sure, I’m a little rattled and I’ll probably have trouble getting to sleep, but we fought a giant spirit monster and solved a bunch of murders. You and Yun fought off a typhoon and saved me and Tiaraq. A sloppy robbery attempt is hardly the biggest thing for me anymore. You’ve spoiled me.”

I run a hand through his hair and roll one of the braids on the side over my fingers. He shudders a little as I brush over his ear. “Well, thank you for coming along and helping me tonight…why don’t I keep spoiling you a little longer?”

We go stumbling back into our room, moving around in the darkness by touch since neither of us is willing to break our kiss long enough to let me light a candle. Finally I catch a wick and we find our bed in the low light without any trouble. I push him lightly onto the sheets, where I can get at the fastenings on his vest and undo them one by one, exposing more smooth, dark skin with each bit of fabric that comes loose. He does the same for my obi and pushes the folds of my kimono aside, making it easy for him to find the end of my chest wraps and undo them as I pull out the laces on his pants. The whole room’s gone hot and humid in the meantime, heat and moisture clinging to us as we grab at each other.

“Kyoshi?” he asks in a quick, unsteady breath. I pause. “I’ve never done this, with anyone…I want to, but—I thought you wanted to take things slow?”

“And now I want to do this for you. Relax…”

With our clothes gone, I can sit at the end of his bare lap and trace my hand down the smooth tone of his chest until I hit home. It’s a world away from toying with him through his pants, with the soft skin and little thatch of hair brushing on my hand, but so much better, too. Nanuq bites down on his lip when I run my thumb along the head of his cock, drawing out a shiver as I go. He slides his hand down my stomach, but I nudge it away and put it back on my breast. I just want to do something nice for him.

“Tell me when you’re close,” I say, and he almost melts into my kiss when I start in with a slow rhythm. A jolt snakes up through my belly every time his hips twitch or he can’t stifle a moan, every time he reminds me of the effect I’m having on him. He’s straining against my hand, moving along with my strokes as best he can with me on top of him, and the little bit of moisture running down to my wrist lets me know when I’ve hit on a good pattern. Yun responds well to a certain edge, I wonder…

“Do you like that?” I ask, almost whispering beside his ear. “Does that feel good, my hand around your cock?”

“ _Ah_ —yes…”

“Good boy.”

A little burst of speed with longer, slower strokes following—it’s easy to figure out what he likes. His hands are running along my body the whole time, down the swells of my breasts or over the muscle in my back, intent on finding every dip and curve he can. So inquisitive. Nanuq kisses and bites all over my throat and collarbone, leaving hot flushes under my skin in his wake every time.

His breathing starts getting faster and more ragged each time I speed up after a few minutes, and I can actually see him start to fall apart in the way his face screws up and the wild bucking of his hips. I relax my grip a little as he gets even harder in my hand, and out of the corner of my eye I can see the water in the wardrobe basin sloshing around. His voice comes out as little more than a strangled moan. “Kyoshi—”

“Are you gonna come for me?”

Nanuq can barely nod. I take my hand away and wrap my arms around his waist instead, kissing him and pressing his cock between us as our hips roll in tandem. He gasps, trembles so violently that I almost lose my grip on him, and a few thick, hot streaks paint up along the length of my stomach. All the tension in his body disappears apart from a few sweet aftershocks, and his kisses become softer, less desperate, but no less intense. We ease down onto the bed, still smiling and tight against each other as we relax.

“Some way to end the evening,” he says as we scoot up toward the pillows.

“I said I’d make it up to you.”

We get ourselves cleaned up and changed in case Yun manages to escape from Rei, and tonight we switch positions. Nanuq nestles in with his back to my chest, and I put my arms protectively around him. It’s a long time before either of us can come down enough to fall asleep, and when we finally do we’re still curled tightly against each other, breathing in time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's the [Fire Nation Imperial Family Tree](http://i.imgur.com/nzUHLeH.png) in case you want to refer to it again.


	28. Tea and Knives

Yun hasn’t returned to our room by the time the sun strikes the bed and rouses me from sleep. Or rather, she hasn’t lingered. Her formal kimono is gone from the top of the wardrobe, and in its place are her usual robes and nightclothes, left in just enough disarray to indicate to the servants what needs washing. It’s good she’s adapted to palace living so quickly. Hardly the worst way to go about things, leaving dirty clothes lying around and having clean ones when we return. Nanuq is still curled up against me, turned away from the sun, and I run my hand through his hair a few times until he comes drifting back to the waking world.

“Morning.”

“I was having the most wonderful dream,” he says through a yawn. “You were there.”

“You’ll have to tell me about it sometime.”

“And Rei was there, and Yun was there—”

On second thought, maybe I don’t need to hear about it. I put a finger over his lips and kiss him lightly on the forehead. What have I unleashed…I stretch a little, but the bed is so comfortable that I don’t want to get up yet. Everything’s still a bit sore after last night, legs and hips and neck—there’s a sting in my wrist too, but that’s probably for a different reason. I roll us over so that Nanuq’s laying with a comfortable weight on my chest, chin balanced on the middle of my collarbone, sleepy blue eyes looking back at me. He’s so warm.

“So…is everything all right?” he asks, shifting about so as not to leave himself pressed on top of my stomach. “Because I know you said you didn’t have the best experiences with men, and—”

“It was just fine, Nanuq. I wouldn’t have kept going if I wasn’t enjoying myself, would I?”

“No, I guess not.” His back arches into my hand, gliding along the fabric of his nightshirt. “This is all new for me, I wanted to make sure I didn’t accidentally do anything stupid.”

I reach up and play with one of the braids by his temple he never seems to let out. “Such a gentleman. Believe me, I’ll tell you if you do anything I don’t like. And is everything fine with you?” I ask. “Did I wound your pride by taking the lead so quickly?”

He shifts against me again. Judging by the stiffness on my belly, he didn’t mind. “No! No, not at all, I…quite enjoyed that,” he admits with a slight darkening in his cheeks. And then, softly, as if he’s afraid I’ll hear, “I hope I’ll get to enjoy it again, soon.”

Yes, it seems I’ve turned a monster loose. Oh well. My hips roll up against his and he responds in kind, slowly, through our clothes. If he wasn’t awake already, he certainly is now. I run a hand up through his hair, pull him as close as I can until I can feel his hot, unsteady breaths on my lips, and whisper, “We should get up.”

Nanuq smiles, though it would be a short change to a grimace. Poor thing. I can’t go spoiling him, though. Keeping balance _is_ my job. He rolls back onto his side of the bed and sits up with a long, low yawn. His arms go up over his head as he stretches, pulling the bottom of his nightshirt up along with them, and I’m treated to the sight of the hard tone of his stomach and the little line of hair running down into his waistband. Come on Kyoshi, focus. I almost tell myself to stop acting like an oversexed teenager, but, I remember with a small pop of recognition…I am. It’s strange to think my life’s taken such a drastic change of course from when I was living in Seizhon and that I’m still only nineteen. We wash up and get ourselves mostly dressed before Rei slides the door open, once again without knocking or announcing herself in any way.

“You could stand to air this room out,” she says, no preamble, no greeting. “I wondered why Yun went to the main complex instead of curling up to you earlier. The smell of arousal is still clinging to everything in here.”

“Good morning to you, too,” I say as I fasten my kimono. I’m hopeless with these topknots that seem to be all the rage in the capital, so I sit at the foot of the bed and let Nanuq do it for me. “Did you enjoy your time with Yun yesterday?”

“She had many interesting stories, yes.” If I didn’t know her better, I’d say she’s almost about to smile. “No doubt we will be expected at court. Preparations for the festival should be starting now, so expect more frivolous talk than before.”

Oh, wonderful. “We’ll be there, you don’t have to wait for us.”

She bows ever so slightly, hands folded into her sleeves, and disappears down the hall. Yun returns a short while later with freshly trimmed hair, and I make a point to hug her tightly. Balance, have to keep balance. “How’d things go last night?” she asks.

“A little excitement in the Teichi Quarter, but the Fire Lord keeps pulling siblings from somewhere,” Nanuq says. “Did you even see her following us with that monster of a bow?”

I shake my head. “Her half-sister seems to vanish into the shadows, she helped us from the rooftop and then disappeared until we got back to the palace.”

Yun cocks an eyebrow. “A kunoichi? I thought they were myths…but Muryo is fine?”

“Apart from the usual, yes. She actually seemed better after Nanuq worked on her, she was able to walk without help when we returned. I guess Kania isn’t as good a healer as people seem to think.”

“Or she’s not actually healing,” Yun offers as she puts a hand across her newly-shortened hair. It’s a bold accusation, dangerously bold. And Ikeda had her own reservations about the woman, too. “And did you get to show the empress what you wanted?”

“We showed her the rest of Kasai. Things might start changing now,” I say. “We should make our appearances at court before Rei has a conniption.”

The Fire Lord, unfortunately, seems to have lost her vigor from the night before, and acknowledges us with only a nod and a weak smile. Maybe she really does have something chronic. Kania is there beside her on the dais, watching her carefully despite the bags under her eyes, though her gaze slips to us more than once during the morning session. There’s no talk of the reforms she mentioned last night, but that may be a slow thing. At least today, before they start in with details of the festival, they’re discussing something important, the delivery and distribution of rice and millet. It’s good to know it’s not all fashion talk. When Muryo signals the end of the session, she announces—through her grandfather, who has a voice that can actually carry past the first few rows—that petitions and hearings will be suspended until after the celebrations in two days’ time. No afternoon session, then.

“We have not been confined to the palace,” Rei says as people begin to mingle about. “There are a number of fine teahouses in the city that would surely enjoy the honor of hosting the Avatar. Otherwise I would like to explore the royal grounds and observe the dragonlings.”

“You don’t need to ask my leave, you’re not my servant. Go enjoy yourself, maybe I’ll find you later and we can practice some of the advanced firebending forms. I still don’t have a good grasp of the fire daggers.”

She nods and disappears into the crowd, leaving the three of us to our own devices. “She didn’t look as good this morning, did she?” I ask.

Nanuq frowns, although whether out of concern or at the perceived slight to his healing abilities I can’t say. Maybe a bit of both. “This shouldn’t be happening, not when it was so easy to heal her last night. I’m going to see if they have anything in the library here about diseases that I can actually read.”

He leaves as well, after a quick kiss on my cheek. Yun doesn’t seem at all perturbed by our lack of company, and she wraps one of her arms around mine. I guess spending the night with Rei reminded her that I’m the better cuddler.

“Excuse me, Avatar Kyoshi?”

It’s an unfamiliar voice, and when I turn around I see it’s come from an Earth Kingdom woman clad in an unusual amount of green for our current locale. Her hair is also done up in a topknot as a nod to the local custom, like mine. Maybe twice my age, though she carries it well. An earthbender too, if the subtle warp in the floor I can feel from her is any indication. “Yes?”

“We haven’t been introduced, my name is Ushima Xi,” she says with an impeccable bow. “I am the Earth Kingdom’s ambassadress to Hitenno. It’s a very great honor to make your acquaintance, Your Holiness.”

“Pleased to meet you, Ambassadress. It’s been quite a while since I’ve met anyone else from Chikyu. Is there something I can do for you?”

“My counterparts in the other nations and I were told to speak with you if we had the opportunity. I’m to extend a formal invitation on behalf of His Majesty King Zhang of Chikyu to the palace in Ba Sing Se,” she says, and then with a small falter in her otherwise serene expression, “White Jade Spire in Omashu has also asked us to convey another…invitation to meet with the Earth Sages. I understand that the authorities at Dragonfire Temple did not confirm your accession and you remain, at least legally, unrecognized as the Avatar.”

“Unrecognized,” I repeat, slowly. She seems to grasp that she’s chosen her words poorly after a moment, and shrinks a bit into her robes. “May I ask why the recognition of the abbot and abbess of the Southern and Eastern Air Temples, the princes of the Tayagun tribe, the Fire Sages of the Shudan Temple and Fire Lord Muryo herself isn’t good enough? Is there a little dance I have to do, say some special words? I realize you’re only doing your job, and I thank you for the messages. When I return to Chikyu, I may find the time and desire to visit Omashu and Ba Sing Se, but I won’t claim any great obeisance to our nation. I belong to the world now, and I will not be ordered about. Good day, Ambassadress Ushima.”

I suppose I’ve sounded decisive enough to brook no argument, and she only replies with another perfect bow before walking away. Yun squeezes my hand. “You’re getting better at the diplomacy thing, but is it really wise to say those kinds of things to your own government? It’s not like the temples where they’ll huff for a bit and then let it go. Don’t people get beaten in Chikyu for speaking like that?”

That they do. One of the supervisors when I used to build houses was from Ba Sing Se, or so he claimed, and he loved to fill our breaks with recounts of the capital. Maybe he just liked to hear himself talk, maybe there was something to it. Thirty turns under the heavy rod for offending the majesty of the crown, and that was for civil servants, people who’d passed the examinations and secured a place for themselves in the endless government bureaucracy. I can only wonder what a bunch of lowly builders in the extreme south of the kingdom would’ve gotten if an official had heard some of the things we said about our absentee government.

“I guess they could try, but they have to be smarter than that. Come on, it’s stuffy in here and I don’t want to deal with any more dignitaries. There’s got to be something we can do in this city. Maybe we can find one of those teahouses.”

“Those are usually where you go to hire courtesans,” Yun says, hunching her shoulders slightly as if she’s ashamed of knowing that. “I really don’t know why Rei suggested that. They do have tea and music there, but most people go to enjoy the…company.”

“And you know this how, exactly?” I ask with one eyebrow cocked. She pulls her collar up higher.

“There was a big collection of Fire Nation scrolls at the Eastern Air Temple. Teahouses are a very popular subject in early Hitennese fiction and poetry.”

Hmm. “How’s the tea?”

⁂

“I really doubt they’re going to believe we only went for the tea.”

Yun is rubbing the tips of her fingers, still sore from trying her hand at the pipa. “Doesn’t matter. What are they going to do? Rei suggested it, after all. And I _did_ go for the tea, it was delicious. You were the one who gave the courtesans the airbending demonstration they wanted and got covered in kisses for your trouble. That was just…”

“What?” Yun asks. “Fire Nation hospitality?”

They were certainly hospitable, but I’m spared a response by some kind of bustle in the palace entry hall. Servants are running about in a frenzy, and it’s all I can do to stop one of them long enough to find out what’s going on. “Hey, hey! Why’s everyone gone mad all of a sudden?”

“Princess-Consort Sei is having her baby,” he says, and then rushes off with his hands full of wet rags.

Oh. Prince Hyōbu’s first wife. Lots of hubbub for a new prince or princess, considering they have several already. Yun bounces up and down on her toes with a broad, beaming smile. Someone’s fond of children, I guess. “Let’s get cleaned up and see if Rei and Nanuq are back yet, we can’t go crowding the royal apartments.”

Apparently almost everyone is in the other wing, because it’s painfully quiet as we return to our room. Even the ever-present Captain Ikeda is nowhere to be seen, though there’s some kind of prickling on the back of my neck, like someone’s gaze is on me. Yun’s hackles are up too, and she’s clenching and unclenching her hands. A palace isn’t meant to be this quiet before dark.

I knock on Rei’s door first when we arrive. No response. “Hoy, Takarabe! Are you napping?”

“Do you smell that?” Yun asks.

“All I can smell is the jasmine tea and sandalwood incense from the teahouse.”

There’s no one inside when I slide the door open. Her bed is made, the basin of water is sitting undisturbed on her wardrobe. She must still be out on the grounds somewhere. Wait, now I can smell something offensive…charcoal—?

The wall to our room shears apart as two people come crashing through the rice paper and wood frame, one a man, the other a woman with a long scar running from her chin to the base of her neck. Yun and I jump back as Kage struggles with the man and finally dashes into our room to grasp at a bow that’s fallen to the ground in their brawl. The man, another cheery-looking sort clad in dark blue with a faltering topknot, gets to his feet an instant before Kage looses an arrow at him. He stumbles back as the arrowhead bites into his shoulder, rattling the wall to Rei’s room, but then he takes notice of us and pulls a knife from its sheath.

Kage is on him again before I can take one of the fans from my belt and cries out in pain when she grabs the knife blade-first. We both cringe when he manages to pull the knife away, tearing across her fingers in the process, but then Yun pushes ahead of me and sends all the air she can forward in a single powerful kick. I love that woman.

He goes flying down to the end of the hall and strikes a large metal statue of some Fire Lord or other before collapsing and trying to get back up. Kage isn’t having it though, and she grabs his knife with her undamaged left hand, dashes toward him so fast I can barely see all her steps, and shoves the knife in between his ribs. I don’t really want to get any closer to whatever this is, but from a distance I can see him start to fight back, give up, and then send a quick burst of flame back into my room before falling still. Kage swears loudly and starts running back to us while frantically waving her bloodied hands to get our attention. “Run, run!” she shouts in her scarred voice, grabbing us by the sleeves and continuing down the hall at a blistering pace.

“Who are you, what’s going on?” Yun demands, but Kage is bent on getting us down the hall, almost bowling over a returning Nanuq in the process. I scoop him up without stopping to explain—what _could_ I explain, honestly—and just hope we don’t come across Rei too, since I’m out of free hands.

Kage yanks us around a corner in the entry hall in time for an explosion to rip through the guest wing, deafening us all and propelling a swarm of wood and metal shrapnel around us. The wave of heat scorches my back, and the whole palace trembles as my ears fill with a heavy, awful ringing. A flaming bit of wall frame comes skittering out toward us, and it’s a task to focus long enough to quench the fire consuming it. Nanuq gets unsteadily to his feet when the palace falls still, pops the cork on his water skin, and starts dousing pockets of flame before they can eat through the walls.

Everyone’s screaming when my hearing comes back, running about like chickens with their heads cut off. Some of the firebenders among the guards jump in beside Nanuq to deal with the fires while Yun sits Kage up against a still-standing wall and I start trying to heal her hand. It’s a group of deep cuts in awkward spots, but I can’t pull Nanuq away to do a better job when the palace could burn from the inside out. “This’ll scar,” I tell her, my voice raspy and ash-choked. She shrugs and points to the long, jagged line running along the middle of her throat. “Yun this is the Fire Lord’s half-sister, Kage. The kunoichi.”

“What happened?” she asks as she blows some soot out of her hair.

“I thought you were in your room, but they got there ahead of me. I was going to tell you that you were in danger, but I’m sure you’ve grasped that by now.”

“They?” I ask.

Kage nods and winces when she tries to move her hand. “Two of them. Piling sacks of black powder under your bed…hence the explosion. Killed the first before you showed up. The second idiot tried to take us all with him. Have to admire that dedication, though.”

I don’t, I really don’t, but I can’t ask more questions before someone bumps into my side and puts their arms around me. “Are you hurt?” Rei asks in an uncharacteristically small voice, buried in the crook of my neck. “Any of you?”

“One knife wound here,” I say. “Kage, Muryo’s sister. She kept us from getting blown up. Give me a minute to finish up here.”

Rei isn’t having any of that, and she has no compunctions about interrogating the wounded. “Who ordered this?”

We’re all nudged aside before she can answer by a woman in blue, who empties her own water skin to tend to the wound. “Hold still,” she says, and then glances over her shoulder at us with a grave look. “I can take it from here.”

Kage’s voice is pointed, arresting, accompanied by a slight nod of her head. My blood chills. “Kania.”


	29. Treason, Sedition, And Other Capital Crimes

“Are you totally sure that’s what she meant?”

Nanuq is half-sunk into one of the impossibly plush futons at the Midnight Jade teahouse here in the Imperial Quarter. Without a guest wing, Chancellor Hebi saw fit to provide us with an unlimited dispensation for whatever lodgings in Kasai that we wanted. Soft music from lightly plucked instruments and coquettish laughs carry easily through the rice paper walls to our private room. Since Yun and I found this place so hospitable earlier, it made sense to come back…but we can take in the entertainment later. Nanuq is still skeptical about Kage’s declaration, as I might be if someone I knew was accused of attempted murder.

“Kania came up to us right after Rei asked her who ordered the assassination, but her name was the very next thing she said,” I say as I try to work my way out of the folds of this damn futon. “She looked right at her, then to us, and said her name. We all knew who she was already, so why do it otherwise? The way she said it, she might as well have been pointing.”

“It was an answer.” Rei’s clutching a little satchel she usually has slung under her robes somewhere, still rattled. “Though whether it was to the most meaningful question is the issue.”

“I think you were close, Takarabe.”

Another scarred voice carries low through the back room we’ve monopolized, and we all turn to see Kage leaning against a post in the wall. “How did you get in here?” Yun asks.

“The door,” Kage says, almost too matter-of-factly, then she shrugs. “I’m good at not being noticed.”

“I’m surprised you were able to get away from the palace in the middle of all this mess,” I say as she takes a seat beside Rei and sinks noticeably into the futon.

“Not as difficult as you might think!” She holds up her bandaged right hand, where a little red is spotting through the white. “I’m useless as a bodyguard at the moment, and worse than useless if I try fighting left-handed. Shiori’s people are around Muryo like a wall for now, and as far as anyone knows I’m still creeping about in one shadow or another. So! To answer your question, Mister Water Tribe, Kania ordered your rooms packed with blasting powder and blown sky high.”

“But that doesn’t make any sense,” Nanuq says in exasperation. As reasonable as he usually is, I think this might be a little too close to home for him to look at objectively. “How do you know? And why would she do it? Because we took the Fire Lord out into the city last night?”

Rei finally looks up from her lap with a glower. “You did what?”

“She asked me to show her the city,” I say, too innocently.

Kage cuts back in before Rei can rejoin. “How do I know? My twin sister is the captain of the palace guards, and I’m in imperial intelligence. Very little happens in the palace that we’re not aware of. One of the guards saw Kania passing money and a small scroll to a servant she’d never been seen talking to before, and then he passed it to the cheery-looking fellows Kyoshi saw me tangling with after they’d loaded your room with blasting powder. I found the servant stuffed in a closet after my hand got fixed, but the slash through his throat made it difficult to interrogate him. And Kania doesn’t seem to know about your little trip, so I doubt it’s that.”

“So we don’t know why she wanted me dead,” I say. A long way around to come back to the same conclusion.

“It’s possible you weren’t the target,” Kage says. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure there are lots of people who want you dead. But there are Shuinan and Shuibei dignitaries in the palace who might’ve taken exception to the way Nanuq was treated, as a member of a subordinate tribe. And I understand the authorities at the Dragonfire Temple aren’t happy with Kyoshi or the cute one here. A bunch of old men with wounded pride can be a very dangerous thing, indeed. Yun’s the only one I can’t imagine being a target.”

“The _what_ one?” Rei asks, cocking an eyebrow. Kage just grins and winks at her. Must run in the family…for someone with such a ragged, rasping voice, she doesn’t seem to have any trouble talking at length. Maybe she doesn’t get the chance very often, hiding in the shadows all the time, and likes getting it out.

“So Kania was only an intermediary,” Nanuq says. “Still not a great possibility.”

“That’s my guess. She’s not above rumors—you wouldn’t believe the things people say when they think they’re alone—but her position and the empress dowager’s favor make her untouchable without a lot of evidence. And you probably were the target, Kyoshi.” Someone takes up a pipa in the next room as Kage clambers off the futon with some difficulty. Her expression drops into something graver. “Kania’s job is too cushy to try and blow up the Avatar of her own volition. She’s someone’s creature, someone who wanted you dead badly enough to let a whole wing of the palace go. They were still pulling bodies from the wreckage when I slipped out. Tread carefully, all of you…Shiori and I can only do so much.”

I don’t actually see her slip out of the room, I only get a vague sense that she’s left. Creepy. Nanuq slumps in his seat. “What now?” he asks, sullen. I can’t hold his mood against him. “Who do you think it was?”

“The Fire Lord?” Yun says. “The empress dowager? Kania owes her position to them, doesn’t she? Or maybe someone else was able to coerce her.”

It’s almost an amusing thought to imagine the Fire Lord trying to blow me up. Poor woman can hardly blow her own nose.

“Did you make any enemies before you came to Shudan?” Rei asks. The edge isn’t gone from her gaze, and I know she’s just waiting to dress us down over our midnight stroll, but for the moment her thoughts are on the fact that we were all very nearly killed.

“Yun’s mother, but I can’t see her ordering an assassination all the way from the Eastern Air Temple.” Yun shivers when I mention Tian and leans in closer to me. “Look, we need answers we’re not going to get from sitting here. Kania has to have an office in the palace, I think we should see what we can find there tonight.”

They all look blankly at me, and Rei gets her composure back first. “Are you actually suggesting that we breach the imperial residence? High treason for me and capital sedition for all of you? I can assure you, executions are not painless in Hitenno.”

“I guess we could just _ask_ Kania, but I doubt she’d be very forthcoming. And it’s not like we can go tearing through all those guards to get at her right now, as much as I might want to…we need to find out who’s behind this, Rei. The longer we wait, the less of a chance we have to find any evidence. If they’re willing to try and kill me, do you think they’d have any qualms about killing the Fire Lord if she became inconvenient?”

She looks down at her lap again, then finally nods when she can’t come up with a counterargument. I love it when I’m right. Yun and Nanuq don’t voice any objections, either. “All right, then. We’ll have to wait until it’s dark. I’ve got the perfect alibi, too.”

We are in a teahouse, after all. I ring the little bell on the table we’re all sitting around, and the door behind me slides open with barely a sound before a few—they call them _hosts_ here, but they’re courtesans—file in to keep us company. Yun goes red when she sees some of them are the same ones we met earlier. The benefits of an unlimited budget…Rei rolls her eyes, but doesn’t actually resist getting flanked on both sides, one man and one woman. While she and Yun get drawn into making a literal wind and fire wheel to impress them, I take Nanuq’s hand and pull him into a tiny annex near the back of the room, where we can get away from the noise.

“Are you sure you want to come with us?” I ask, stroking along the edge of his cheek. “I know this can’t be easy, with Kania. I’d understand if you want to stay back with all the…comfort and succor.”

Personally, _I_ wouldn’t mind staying back with all the comfort and succor, but it’s my incredibly stupid, suicidal plan so I’m stuck with it. Nanuq grabs me around the waist, but it’s not a needful touch as much as a pleading grasp for support. I put my arms around him and squeeze.

“I _know_ her,” he says in a quiet, unsteady voice. “Or…I thought I did. We don’t have a big tribe, everyone knows each other. She was going to marry Tiaraq before she decided to leave to become a healer. We don’t have the benefit of the Shuinan’s numbers. Everything we do outside our borders comes back as a reflection on us, good and bad. And now I find out she tried to have you blown up. I couldn’t—I can’t lose you, Kyoshi. I can’t.”

“You won’t. A little black powder isn’t enough to kill me, the other Avatars would never let me live it down.” I hug him tightly while spots of moisture stain through the part of my kimono that’s at eye level with him. “Don’t feel like you have to come with us if you think it could endanger your tribe. Someone should keep the poor courtesans company, after all.”

There’s a large rush of wind behind us, followed by applause. He shakes his head. “No, I’m coming with you. I need to know why Kania did this. I need to make sure she answers for it.”

His grip is strong and steady, like he’s afraid I’ll go up in smoke if he lets me go, and my heart twists over itself. “We’ll make sure.”

⁂

This may not have been my best idea.

As might be expected, the palace is on high alert, and even getting close to the main gate is complicated by the throng of people gathered there. The candles they’re holding light up the dark while they wish the Fire Lord well or clamor for a bit of information about the still-smoldering wreck that’s replaced a third of the palace. For a moment I let myself believe that all these nobles and well-to-dos are turned out to offer prayers for the servants and guards killed in the blast.

We’ve forgone our nice clothes for simple, dark red tunics so we can make our way around the palace perimeter without attracting too much attention. It isn’t lost on me that we’re using the Fire Lord’s largesse to break into her home, but I keep telling myself that it’s for good reason. She might be in danger. Things are calmer once we’re away from the crowd, and I can sense through the ground that there are plenty of guards on duty outside tonight. Wonderful.

Near the back of the enormous garden is a section of wall that hasn’t been reinforced with metal, and I’m able to bend a small bit away to let us through. Torches and braziers are lit at regular intervals leading back to the palace and the stables, so we’re forced to take the long way around, keeping ourselves in darkness wherever we can. In the spots where passing close to light is unavoidable, Rei snuffs the fire long enough for us to creep past, and then reignites it to not leave a trail. Some of the dragonlings lazing by the lake prick up when we go by, but their night vision isn’t developed yet, and mercifully none of them start screeching as we make our final approach.

It figures that all the exterior doors in the back of the palace are made of unbendable wood and metal. They’re also quite locked. We wait in the shadows by the door closest to the imperial wing until a guard emerges for his shift, yawning and paying no mind to his surroundings. Nanuq pops the cork on one of his water skins, mumbles a hasty apology, and wraps a tendril around the guard’s neck until he slumps to the ground, still breathing but certain to wake up with a sore throat. We get in through the door before it falls shut, and then we’re in the imperial residence.

And here I thought the guest wing was opulent. The walls are swirling red onyx buttressed by enormous white jade pillars, rugs so thick I can barely feel the rich black floor underneath run the length of the halls, and hanging from the ceiling are half-lit chandeliers awash in glittering crystal to throw the light.

“Let’s find her office quickly and see what’s there.” I peek around the nearest corner and find the next hall empty. Hopefully most of the security is _outside_ the residence, keeping threats from breaching the sanctum. “Try not to hurt the guards too much, they’re only doing their jobs.”

Very few of the doors are labeled, but the sound of crying behind one of them is a pretty good indication of Prince Hyōbu’s quarters. I suppose Princess Sei delivered her baby without any complications. Muryo’s apartments can’t be too far away from the prospective crown prince’s…and Kania is her servant, so any rooms she uses should be close by, too. The pillars in the next hall have gold veins laced in among the jade, which seems as good an indication as any that the imperial chambers are here. I motion for everyone to follow my lead as I go around the pillar.

And right into Captain Ikeda.

We both stumble back half a step, and her training kicks in before she can identify me. Her hand slides across her waist to her sword, and her lips are parting in the beginnings of a shout, so I have to shut her up somehow, quickly. There’s no time to go with anything but my first thought, so I clasp my hands on her cheeks and pull her into a deep, muffling kiss.

It’s probably a good thing I can’t see Yun or Nanuq’s reactions behind me, but fortunately Rei still has it together as she steps up next to me. “Captain, please stay calm,” she breathes, just loud enough to be heard over Shiori’s sounds of confusion. “We mean no harm to the Fire Lord. Keep from shouting when Kyoshi—Kyoshi, stop kissing her. Stop it!”

Wait a second, is that her tongue going over my lips? This woman really gets set on things. I pull back, only a bit at first in case she decides to yell anyway, but then I straighten out when it becomes clear that she’s still too shocked to do much beyond stare back at me, dazed. “I…wouldn’t read too deeply into that,” I say quietly. Yun huffs.

“Do you have a death wish or something?” Shiori asks when she can find words again. She leads us into an alcove, where at least we’re not visible from all the way down the corridor. “What in the hell are you doing here? Kage told me you all took up in that brothel.”

“Teahouse,” I say. “And she told us that Kania was the one who ordered the guest wing blown up, probably to kill me. I wanted proof before I beat her head in. Where’s her office?”

She’s thumbing the hilt of her sword and no longer meeting my gaze. “You’re putting me in a very awkward position, Kyoshi. This isn’t the part of the palace you get arrested for sneaking around in, we’re supposed to kill trespassers.”

“Trying to do so would end very badly for you,” Rei says flatly.

“So I’ve surmised…look, her office is there, but the lock is some kind of waterbending trick.”

Nanuq looks over at the door she points out, where instead of a knob to turn or a handle to slide, there’s a small metal indentation with a pair of holes leading into the wood. “Not a problem.”

“Fine, then. Knock me out before you go.”

“What?” Why does this woman try to get hit so much? Do I just have a knack for attracting the submissive types?

“How do you think it’ll look if I’m still on my route with you four creeping around? At least I’ll have a good reason for not stopping you—”

A blast of air from Yun blows her back into the next pillar, and she falls to the ground with a low groan. We all look at her, but her expression isn’t giving anything away. I guess it’s better than channeling any jealousy at Nanuq. “What? She asked.”

Sometimes I forget that she can pack a punch when she wants to. She and Rei wait while Nanuq and I go to the door. “All right, show me how to do this.”

“It’s a water lock, and a pretty simple one. Not many other waterbenders around here to try and pick it. The trick is to fill both of the cavities here with just enough water so the whole thing won’t crack and jam when you freeze it.” He tests it carefully, feeling through the water to determine the amount he needs. “Then you ice it over, and…there. Now the ice will turn like a regular doorknob.”

So it does, and the door swings open noiselessly. I see that Rei’s at least arranged Shiori so she won’t wake up with a crick in her neck, though the headache may be unavoidable. I wave them over and we all head inside.

Unlike all the ostentation outside, Kania’s office is a rather small, austere space sacrificing almost all form for function. The only indulgences seem to be the polar bear dog pelt rug and the masterfully wrought candle holders that throw odd shadows when Rei and I light the candles in them. On one wall is a trio of shelves taking up most of the width of it, lined with scrolls and books in Shuishei that I can’t hope to read. Nanuq takes that side of the office.

“No wonder I couldn’t find anything in my language in the library,” he says as he takes one scroll from its place. “She must have a copy here of every medical text ever written in all the tribes.”

On the opposite wall, there are again shelves, but these are lined with small vials filled with herbs and other substances of all colors, labeled in both Hitennese and Shuishei. A few stacks of paper interspersed among them list potential uses and interactions in a tight, scrawled hand. Rei goes to that wall. “A better stock than most apothecaries,” she says. “I wonder how much of this she really uses…?”

And then, at the back of the room, is a sitting cushion in front of a low wooden desk. Yun and I decide to look through that. She keeps her space quite clean—or she’s not in here very often, tending to the Fire Lord as she is, offering healing of questionable efficacy. Her inkstone looks like it hasn’t been touched in weeks, and the only other things are papers held under blue jade paperweights in the shape of coiled hydras. There are a number of forms written in the Hitennese vulgate, so I can actually read them. Treatment plans, recipes, a progress report about the Fire Lord in remarkably familiar terms—ach, I set the next paper down. I don’t need to know how well Muryo’s last…intimate exam went.

“Find anything about black powder or murder?” I ask.

Rei shakes her head. “There are a number of powders here, some of them black, but nothing incriminating. Achyranthis, loquat leaf, crushed senna seeds…no blasting powder here.”

“Nanuq?”

“Doesn’t look like there’s much recent stuff in all this,” he says. “Nothing about orders or money or any of us. Makes sense that she wouldn’t keep a written record.”

“Shit.” I put my fist down on the desk, and one of the paperweights falls on its side with a _clink_. Odd, it’s glass that makes that kind of sound, not jade. Yun picks it up and turns it over in her hand before showing me the bottom, where a bit of painted cork is stopping up a hole. I work it out with some effort—cork is one of those irritating materials that can’t be bent—and out slides a small glass vial much like the ones on the wall, except that it’s completely unlabeled. Inside is a fine, jet-black powder. “Well, well…what have we here, Lady Kania?”

The door behind us falls shut, and when we turn around we’re face to face with Kania herself, one hand pinching her robe shut, the other resting on the water skin fastened to her hip.

“I was about to ask you the same question.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Captain Ikeda Shiori and Ikeda Kage, art by [AATKAW](aatkaw.tumblr.com)


	30. Secrets Under Moonlight

“We need to have a talk.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” Kania says as she steps slowly into the room. I move in front of Yun a little, and Rei and Nanuq come quickly to my sides. “Would you like to start with what you’re doing ransacking my office in the dead the night? Or maybe how you got into this wing at all? I’m sure the guards would like to know that.”

“Let’s go back a bit farther,” I say. “To this afternoon, when you tried to have us all killed.”

One corner of her mouth turns in amusement, and an eyebrow edges upward. “Are you drunk? Why would I do that? What could I possibly gain?”

“We thought you could tell us,” Rei says through a rasping growl. “You were seen passing money and instructions to a servant, and he passed them to the assassins now lying dead in the remains of the guest wing.”

Kania says something in Shuishei that’s likely meant to be a response, and Nanuq frowns, but she seems to catch herself and repeat it in Hitennese. “You should be talking to him, then. I talk to plenty of servants every day. _I’m_ a servant, in case you’ve forgotten. Nanuq, what is this nonsense? You know me.”

“Thought I did.”

“All right,” she says, still holding up her air of nonchalance, “clearly that explosion rattled your head, Avatar. I’d be happy to heal it for you, but you’ve got your friends here wrapped so tight around your little finger that they think I’m some kind of ice-blooded killer. I’m sorry your rooms were destroyed, but I live here and I’m not in the habit of blowing up my home. I think you ought to go back to wherever it is you’ve bedded down and forget all this, and I might not mention it to the Fire Lord.”

“One more question.” I hold up the small vial that was hidden in her paperweight. Some of the fine black powder shuffles about as I move it. “What’s this?”

“Private.”

“Rei, who do you go to if you need something like this identified?” I ask. “An apothecary?”

The curl drops off of Kania’s lip as she pops the cork on her water skin, but Yun’s already pushing past me and bringing her arms in a wide spiral. The air around Kania’s feet kicks up in a whirl, and she goes spinning once, twice, three times before tumbling to the floor, water spilling out around her as she goes. Her head raises up a bit, eyes all glassed over, and then she falls still.

“Another imperial servant attacked, that makes three tonight. Wonderful.” Rei shakes her head as she goes to the door and pushes it further shut so we have some privacy. “Is there anything here we can use to tie her up?”

I pull off a bit of stone from the wall and fasten it around her wrists, one after the other until she’s well and truly cuffed. “How’s that for you?”

“Yes, your utility is endless. We should sit her up, at least then we might appear to have some semblance of a plan.”

She and Nanuq pull Kania by her arms into a loose sitting position. I haven’t had much of a chance to see her up close for very long, but she’s very comely. “You know,” Nanuq says as they take a step back and wait for her to come to, “if we’re wrong, we’re either going to get ourselves killed or have to fight our way out of here.”

“Maybe not. Whatever’s in this tube got her riled up enough to try and attack us. Muryo might think twice about having us killed if this turns out to be incriminating.”

“It could also be nothing,” Yun says quietly. “Without someone to identify it or a confession, it’s just some powder. I know if I had a little hiding place like that I’d want to use it for something.”

“Look, if it comes to that…I’ll take the blame. Or at least give you three time to get away. This was my idea, I won’t let you suffer for it. I’m the Avatar, I’ve got to be worth at least a few minutes in a fight.”

All of them look at me, and I’m not sure whether they or I feel more surprised. I stare at the floor and grind the toe of my boot into the carpet. If there were any people I’d be willing to die for…well. We’ll have to hope it doesn’t come to that. The awkward outgrowths of my declaration will have to wait, because Kania starts groaning as her head drifts from side to side.

“Shall we try this again?” Rei asks, more to herself than anything. She walks behind Kania, gathers up all her loose hair, and pulls her to attention. I have a sneaking suspicion that whatever Kania mutters in Shuishei in response to that means something very close to _bitch_. Nanuq takes the little vial from my hand and crouches down in front of her.

“What is this?”

“You’re out of your mind, Nanuq. Is this really what’s going to happen here? I knew there was a reason I liked Tiaraq more than you, he wasn’t crazy…fine. It’s tea from home.”

“Why was it hidden?” Yun asks.

“Did you notice the eighty other vials in this room? I didn’t want it getting mixed up. And Muryo just _has_ to try every single tea in arm’s reach, I wanted to keep it for myself. It’d be too bitter for her, anyway. Is that so wrong?”

Nanuq shakes his head and starts running his thumb over the stopper. “That’s really the best you can come up with? We make one tea, and it’s sweet, not bitter. Still too fresh out of sleep to come up with a decent lie?”

“If you’re not happy with the truth, then there’s nothing else I can say. We can wait here all night until the guards find us.”

Without any warning, Nanuq pushes Rei to the side and then shoves Kania down onto her back. He pulls the stopper off the vial and uses his thumb to contain it instead as he stays coiled over Kania’s chest. “What is it? _What is it_?”

“You’re fucking crazy! Someone help me!”

“What is this? What’ve you been doing?” he half-asks, half-snarls. Yun and I trade a look as Rei steps farther back, impassive as ever. Nanuq’s supposed to be one of the nice ones here, this is…he must be truly desperate.

Kania’s tears and frantic, strangled sobs shatter any illusion that the powder is harmless. Nanuq tips it upside-down above her mouth, thumb still in place, and holds her nose closed when she clamps her mouth shut to avoid accidentally catching any on her tongue. She starts writhing as much as she can under him and looks desperately at each of us in turn. Rei gives her no quarter and I look away, but Yun’s expression twists into a frown as she nervously thumbs at the beads on her pendant. “Nanuq, this isn’t helping,” she says after a moment. “Please, you’re going to hurt her, stop—!”

“Black lotus,” Kania squeaks out, barely opening her lips to do so. She’s shaking all over, kicking fruitlessly to try and free herself. Anything else she says dissolves into incoherence among her tears and Nanuq’s shuffling as he gets up. Her robe’s almost fallen open at the top, and she rolls onto her side and curls up as best she can. The choked sobs sound much louder in the tiny room.

Nanuq looks…not much better than her, honestly. Drained. I know that kind of viciousness doesn’t come naturally to him. He stops up the vial again and scowls at the floor. “Anyone know what that is?”

“Black lotus is the ground-up petals of a moonflower plant, mostly used to add fragrance to incense,” Rei says. She takes the vial and takes a whiff, only to recoil at the strength of the scent before setting it down on the desk. “Almost cloying in concentrate. Toxic, though not greatly so, and sweet in diffusion. Potent enough to…to…”

She levels a furious glare at Kania. “Potent enough to keep someone weak and fragile if applied slowly.”

Nanuq doesn’t wait for anything else before he rounds on Kania again, and she bites back a yelp when he pulls her up into a sitting position. “You were poisoning the Fire Lord? Why? _Why_? Don’t you know what she could do to us? To our tribe?”

Yun has a point, we probably won’t get much out of her if her nerves are too raw to speak. I put a hand on Nanuq’s shoulder and he backs away, still fuming to keep himself from crying but at least out of arm’s reach of her. “Start talking,” I say as I pull her robe closed. “Not like you can make things much worse for yourself now.”

There’s a long moment when all she can do is catch her breath and look fearfully into my eyes, but I wait, unmoving, while everyone else keeps their distance.

“It wasn’t ever enough to kill her,” Kania finally says in a raw, tear-choked voice. She’s still crying, but she seems to have it under control now. “Obviously.”

“How?”

“Her tea. Morning and afternoon.”

“To what end?” Rei asks. “Have you no sense of loyalty?”

“You wouldn’t understand. None of you would,” she mutters, then looks at Nanuq. “Your home wasn’t a little knot of huts pressed in on all sides. Every day wasn’t a new threat from your neighbors. I thought…I thought I could help.”

“What did you do, Kania?” Nanuq asks, visibly fighting the urge to take a step toward her. She recoils anyway, like a beaten dog.

“I didn’t want anyone to get hurt!” She leans forward in earnest, but Muryo’s seizures and all the bodies pulled out of the guest wing make her outburst fall flat. And then again, quieter, “No one was supposed to get hurt.”

“Only stay on the brink of invalidity forever?” Rei asks. I’m tempted to tighten the shackles, but the Avatar can’t be vindictive. Shouldn’t be, anyway. I tighten them a little. “But that still leaves your motive unexplained. You would not come all the way to Hitenno and ingratiate yourself only to poison the empress.”

Kania’s voice is quiet, almost too low to hear even in the small room. “I was told that all the merchant agreements the Fire Nation has with the Shuinan would go to the Tayagun if I did this. If I kept her sick, like she was when I got here. Some kind of fever.”

Nanuq pinches the bridge of his nose. Every fear he had seems to be getting realized. “Who could possibly make a promise like that?” I ask.

“Chancellor Hebi.”

She says it like it’s the most obvious thing in the world, but it takes us all for a turn, and disgusted looks are all we can muster for several minutes. Even Rei doesn’t bother to hide her revulsion. Finally Yun speaks up. “How…how could her own grandfather do this?”

“Her rightful authority would fall to the chancellery if she was unable to discharge her duties,” Rei says. “Vicious, even for the highest level of politics. But you had to have known he had no intention of honoring any promises he made you, Kania. Your life was in his hands from the first time you adulterated that tea. He would have used you for as long as he could and then disposed of you as soon as you became an inconvenience.”

Kania nods once with a grimace. “I know that now. I’m not as naïve as I was when I first came here. But I couldn’t stop, he would’ve exposed me and had me killed if I didn’t do what he wanted. And he wanted a lot…but it would always be my word against his.”

Nanuq says something to her in Shuishei that makes her tremble and break out in fresh sobs. It’s deeper and harder than his usual voice, more a prince than my sweet, nervous lover. Kania’s response is jumbled by her crying, and Nanuq’s expression falters for a moment, but he only shakes his head. She slumps even further, and I put my hand around his arm. Maybe it’s selfish, but I don’t want him losing himself over this. “Nanuq?”

“I banished her from the tribe,” he says. His mouth pulls to the side, as if he’s trying to keep from frowning. “I can’t—I can’t let this come back to the rest of us. The Fire Nation navy could wipe us out without a thought.”

For a moment I almost feel sorry for her. For a moment. Yun steps up beside me, still watching Kania with no small wariness. “That’s all awful, but it still doesn’t explain why you tried to have us killed today. What good would that do?”

“I just do the things I’m told,” Kania says miserably. “He had me slip another set of herbs into Sei’s tea to induce her labor, get the guest rooms packed with blasting powder when you two were coming back into the palace, and deliver the baby as soon as I heard the explosion. Didn’t ask why. He wouldn’t tell me, anyway.”

“Oh—!”

We all turn to Rei, whose head shoots up so fast she has to be spinning. “Hyōbu is the crown prince, and Princess Sei is of the Jiwara clan, just like the chancellor. Both are firebenders. What kind of asinine plot…could he really be that deluded?”

“You want to share, Rei?” Nanuq asks.

“The next Avatar will be a natural firebender. If Kania delayed the birth until the moment of the explosion, the exact moment when Kyoshi was supposed to die, it may have been their child. And even if not, the next Avatar would still be a subject of Hitenno. The man is clearly power-drunk. Could he really believe he would be able to determine the next Avatar?”

I feel sick suddenly, like my stomach’s about to turn. Am I just some tile on a board to these people? Is my life something to be bargained with or traded away? I’m sharing my body with the Avatar spirit so I can help the world, and there are people who’re trying to kill me so they can control the next person in the cycle. I have to pity the other Avatars, past and future. We can never have an ordinary life.

“You’ll have to ask him that, I haven’t seen him since we saw you all survived the explosion.”

“He must have quit the palace when he realized his scheme failed.” Something else seems to occur to Rei, and she gently touches the clasp on the front of her tunic. “Kania, where do you get the black lotus?”

She looks up at Rei. She’s calmer now, resigned. Must know the best she can hope for is the mercy of a swift death. “The chancellor always delivers it to me. His estate is away from the palace, I just assumed he had it grown there.”

“The soil on Hanshu is improper for moonflowers because of the volcano. It usually only grows on the outlying islands, near Chikyu, where conditions are less arid, except…oh, no.”

“Except what?” Yun asks.

“Dragonfire Temple imports soils to produce their own incense,” she says, fiddling with her clasp so much that the fabric around it starts to fray. “They have a glasshouse where they could grow moonflowers. Were the sages complicit in this, too?”

There’s a high, sharp gasp from just beyond the door to the hall. Yun crosses the office in a single swift motion and pulls the door open. The Fire Lord is there in a bright red robe, leaning on a still-dazed Shiori and crying as quietly as she can with one hand held loosely over her mouth. “Your Majesty,” Nanuq begins, still desperate to keep his tribe from retribution, but Muryo puts her hand up to quiet him and makes her way slowly to Kania. She sits seiza with some difficulty right in front of her.

“Look at me, Kania,” she says in her soft voice. Kania does so after a moment, eyes bloodshot with fresh tears rolling down her cheeks, and then it’s like the rest of us aren’t in the room. “I loved you—love you like a sister.”

She nods slowly, then strains for a moment against her shackles, as if she means to try and hug the Fire Lord out of instinct. “I know. I doubt you believe me now, but I love you, too. You should just kill me, Muryo- _han_.”

The intimacy of the honorific makes Rei cock an eyebrow, but we stay silent. Muryo’s hair is down, flowing along the length of her robe like a waterfall of black. “I will decide everything in the morning with a clearer head. For now I don’t know whether to embrace your or slap you.” She looks over her shoulder at me. “Avatar Kyoshi, my grandfather…”

“We’ll find him,” I say.

“Alive, if possible. Agni knows what other schemes he had in place.”

Kania nods her head to the left. “There’s spirit water on the shelf there. Black lotus won’t last very long in your body with proper healing if you don’t have any more exposure, not in that concentration.”

“You’ll understand if your healing expertise is in question right now,” Muryo says. Kania bows her head, and the Fire Lord turns the other way. “Prince Nanuq, would you…I felt so much better after your healing last night.”

“Yes, of course.” He takes the jar from the rack on the wall, and I see Rei looking impassively at it until Nanuq helps Muryo up and back to her apartments. Old burns would be no match for spirit water, I’m sure, but she says nothing as they slip out of sight.

I’m about to ask Shiori to keep Kania in the office, but she looks like she’s having trouble staying upright. Note to self, don’t make airbenders jealous. “Yun, can you make sure she stays in here?”

“Mmhmm. Don’t get yourself hurt,” she says through a quick hug.

“Avatar Kyoshi?” Kania won’t meet my gaze, and instead her eyes hover around my boots. “I know you probably won’t, but…the cuffs. They’re cutting into my wrists.”

A flash of pain slices through my belly when I remember the ‘games’ from my childhood that involved cuffs. I’m not—I’m not cruel. I’m not my brothers. I take the shackles off her wrists and clamp them around her ankles instead, loose enough to not cause pain but tight enough to keep her from walking. She winces, but nods as she rubs her wrists. “Thank you.”

Her life is probably over, anyway. We leave her inside and shut the door behind us. Another guard is coming down the hall to relieve Shiori, and Yun helps her sit down against a pillar until she’s cogent enough to walk around. As long as she’s not blasting her through the air, I guess. Rei and I get directions to the chancellor’s estate, and then we set off through the palace.

“So what do you think will happen?” I ask as the small service door beside the main palace doors closes behind us. It’s a humid night, and only a handful of people are remain outside the main gate. We’re still in our red tunics, so we’re able to pass through unnoticed.

Rei is silent as she considers the question. “I do not know. The Fire Lord is a very kind woman, some might say kinder than her position can truly allow. And as much as it offends a…baser sense of justice in me, Kania was also a victim of the chancellor, strung between duty to her benefactor and loyalty to her tribe. She may yet live.” We turn down the street we were told. “The sages may be compelled to step down or commit suicide if an investigation implicates them. I mean to leave the order if they were complicit in this. As for the chancellor, his fate is the most muddled to me. The Hitennese may be comfortable with true power lying somewhere other than the throne, but they will not tolerate conspiracy against the daughter of heaven. The Jiwara are a powerful clan, but doubtless outcry could force him out of the chancellery regardless.”

“Muryo seems like the sweetest woman. I know family members can treat each other badly, but this?”

“Power is a heady thing, Kyoshi,” Rei says, “and after a time most of it becomes dedicated to securing more and safeguarding against threats to it. Speaking of which, we should expect resistance at the estate. A man so used to having his way will not quietly surrender himself into custody.”

Hebi’s mansion isn’t far, and indeed seems like the closest home to the palace. Appropriate, I guess. The walls are carved in tasteful stone—laced with metal, I can feel—and the iron gates are expertly wrought, lying still in the night. No guards stand at the gate, and I meet no resistance as I push it open. I’m not sure how to take that, but Rei clenches her hands into fists and makes bright, hot daggers spring to life around them. I clutch at one fan in my belt as we step onto the property.

Apart from some outbuildings and a very nice pavilion for tea ceremonies, the main building dominates the complex, larger than any sense of proportion gives it a right to be.  Altogether too grandiose. Once again, we see no one, and no movement but for some flowers swaying in the wind. Rei hasn’t a mind to trifle and kicks in the main door without preamble, only to reveal a receiving hall devoid of people.

“Looks like they left in a hurry,” I say as I pick up a small, gold-veined cup from a tray left on a cabinet. “Tea’s cold.”

“Or everyone has retreated deeper into the house.”

For all her justified caution, each room we check is more disconcertingly still and empty than the last. Instruments have been put away neatly, pillows and cushions are stacked among folded futons, candles have all been extinguished…frankly I would have preferred if there _was_ fighting. All we’re left with is a steadily mounting tension, like something or someone’s hovering just out of view, and an unpleasant odor growing in strength as we move through the house. If Rei catches a whiff of it, she says nothing, but unless her nose is burned out from the black lotus she has to be smelling it.

The master bedroom, richly adorned and appointed as it is, is empty. Bed’s made, fine silk nightclothes are still laid out on top of the sheets, but there’s no occupant for either. Finally I feel ready to gag. “Rei, do you smell that?”

“Of course. Any thoughts to a source?”

“I don’t know, but it’s bad.”

She pushes past me, struck by yet another realization she doesn’t seem inclined to share right away, and hurries down the hall without looking in any of the rooms along the way. At the end of the hall is a door with gold flecks hammered into the wooden supports, and she throws it open, only to turn away from the sight inside.

That explains the stench. Chancellor Hebi, clad in fine white robes, is in a slumped seiza in the middle of what looks like his private study. In front of him is a small black stand supporting a long dagger, its blade run red to match the stains on the floor and the bottom half of the chancellor’s robes. Beside it is an inkstone and a thin piece of parchment, recently used. Some of his innards are…ugh.

“ _Seppuku_ ,” Rei says as she takes a cautious step into the room. “No _kaishakunin_ , either. He suffered greatly without a second at the ready to end the agony.” There’s almost a trace of admiration in her voice.

“Did he hear us break in?”

“No. See the stains on his robe? Already set, hours old.” She rests the back of one hand against his cheek, then flashes a burst of cleansing flame over her skin after pulling it away. “Room temperature. And the ink on his death poem has dried.”

She picks up the parchment and looks it over. I peer over her shoulder, but the Hitennese is too formal for me to understand. “Hmm, a wounded heron at the sea, encroached by the rising tides. Appropriate imagery for a _jisei_ , though the presentation of himself as the victim is somewhat less than truthful…”

“You mean to tell me he did this before we even broke into the palace?”

“So it would seem,” Rei says, carefully laying the parchment from where she’d taken it. “Slowly poisoning the Fire Lord was concealable as long as he had Kania to take the blame, but no one could reasonably believe she ordered your death of her own accord. Their connection would come to light sooner or later.”

Well sure, it’s easy to say all that after the fact. Sometimes I forget how smart Rei is.

“More than likely he set himself to this as soon as he saw the assassination attempt had failed. He had his servants put his house in order, dismissed them, and took his own life before his involvement could be uncovered. He may have lived, if the Fire Lord saw fit to be merciful.”

This night is getting worse and worse. Suddenly I’m struck by the urge to go to sleep and forget all this for a little while. “What do we do now?”

“What can we do? Return to the palace and inform the Fire Lord of the suicide when her healing is through. This leaves no one to deny anything Kania says, and speaks poorly to his innocence. We should go. There has been enough death today.”

⁂

None of us wanted to disturb the Fire Lord in the middle of her healing, and so we waited, and waited, with Yun once we returned. Every time the guard passed us, he had to remind himself that we weren’t intruders—or, we were, but the Fire Lord would probably be annoyed if we were thrown out or executed.

Dawn can’t be far off, but my mind’s too alight to sleep yet, despite my exhaustion. Yun and Rei are leaning in on either side of me, dozing lightly, when the door to Muryo’s apartments finally opens. Nanuq steps out, and I carefully extricate myself from the arrangement, leaving Yun and Rei to curl up to each other in my absence. Tired, accomplished, sorrowful…he looks all sorts of things. I hug him quickly. “So?”

“She’ll need a special diet for a while to put muscle back on and help with the lingering effects, but I’m confident about a full recovery. We spent the last hour or two getting some of her strength back with stretches,” Nanuq says, obviously proud of himself before his tone falls. “Kage popped out of the shadows a little while ago with a report. The chancellor’s dead, right? Suicide?”

I decide not to ask how she managed to get in and out of the apartments without me noticing. “Yes. It was grisly.”

He nods. “Muryo decided that dragging the truth out wouldn’t serve much purpose, then. Kage also told us she found recently pruned moonflowers at the temple’s glasshouse, so the sages are being…dealt with. And Muryo said she was going to honor the deal Kania made about the contracts going to the Tayagun. Wanted to thank me for helping her.”

There’s some reticence in his voice, and his hand trails reluctantly over my side. “Nanuq?”

“Kyoshi, um, you have to understand, the Fire Lord suddenly had more energy than she’d had in years.”

“What’s the matter?” He’s not very quick to meet my gaze, so I run two fingers through his hair. “That’s good, isn’t it?”

“It is, but she really didn’t know what to do with herself for a moment. We’d been talking all night and she was mostly naked while I worked, so she also offered to thank me in a more…personal way,” he says, almost mumbling the last bit.

Not like I can really blame her for trying. Nanuq’s cute. “So did she?”

“No! No, I politely declined, I told her we were together. I don’t want anyone like that but you. She was just overjoyed at being able to move and breathe like a regular healthy twenty year-old and I was the nearest person. Besides, it’s not ethical to do something as intimate as healing someone and then have sex with them. I think she was more embarrassed than me, actually.” He looks up at me, ready to shrink away, but keeps his hand on my side. “Please don’t hit me on the head.”

“I’m not going to hit you, why would I do that?”

Yun and I spent all afternoon enjoying the view in a teahouse, I don’t think I could begrudge Nanuq something like that, even if he’d done it. But it’s a nice stroke to my pride that he’s not interested in anyone else. He’s spared from having to respond by Muryo coming out of her apartments, a little red in the face when she sees us but otherwise in good health. She’s not slumped or holding the walls for support, the bags under her eyes are nearly gone, and her hair’s in a fine, high topknot adorned with the crown. “Thank you again, Prince Nanuq. I’ll see that the accords we discussed are delivered to Chief Suli as soon as possible,” she says, bowing slightly as he does the same. Both of them stop rather quickly and look away from each other. “I’m glad to finally be rid of all this awful black lotus. Did you destroy the last bit, Kyoshi?”

“No, I—Rei, did you take the black lotus when we left?”

She cracks one bleary eye from over Yun’s shoulder, then springs to her feet, suddenly awake and seized by panic, and Yun follows shortly with the commotion. My stomach lurches, Muryo gasps, and Nanuq rushes for the office door.

We left the poison with Kania.

The door’s fallen locked again, and Nanuq rips the whole mechanism out of the door with his ice. Kania’s sitting up in front of her desk, ankles still confined, and she’s holding the vial with shaking hands, running her thumb over the opening. I would’ve thought she’d cried herself dry by now, but fresh tear streaks mar her face, and she trembles when Muryo steps into the room.

“Seal that and put it down. Kyoshi, can you take those shackles off?”

Kania seems surprised at the strength of the Fire Lord’s voice, but she does as she’s told and scrambles to her feet once I free her. I go up and put the vial in my belt as Muryo hugs her tightly.

“Your Majesty—”

“Stop that. You don’t call me that.”

She’s a bit shorter, but not so short that she can’t rest her chin in the crook of her healer’s neck. “I love you, Kania- _han_ , and I forgive you,” Muryo says, shivering as Kania returns her embrace, “but you have to leave. I’ll see that you have a ship with a crew and enough money to establish yourself somewhere else, but you can’t stay in Kasai.”

“What about your grandfather?” Kania asks.

“That matter…resolved itself. I will see that no dishonor comes to you or your tribe as a result of all this. I’ll have servants help you pack your things in the coming days. Write to me when you find a new place to call home?”

Kania runs her fingers along the nape of Muryo’s neck, looking sadly down at the floor. “Of course.”

They separate, hands briefly clasping, and then Muryo pulls away and starts for the door. “Kyoshi, could you join me on the west balcony in a few moments? The one behind the throne room. Lady Yun, Lady Takarabe, you’re welcome to use my rooms if you’d prefer something softer than the…floor.”

She disappears down the hall with a new, confident stride. It becomes her. “Sleep sounds good,” Yun says, and Rei and Nanuq follow her across the hall. Kania looks everywhere but me, likely still shocked that she’s being allowed to live. Cast out from every home she’s ever had, but alive. I can imagine the feeling.

“I have two questions,” I say, and she finally looks at me. “Are you actually a healer?”

“Yes. A good one, ask Nanuq.”

“I’m choosing to trust you. Not entirely sure why. Second question, can you speak Chikyan?”

“The courtiers like to compose their poems in Chikyan, I’ve picked up enough to get by if I had to.”

Kania steps aside as I kneel down at her desk, wet her inkstone, and write on a blank piece of parchment. She turns her head slightly when I hand it to her. I don’t think my handwriting is _that_ bad, really. “Seizhon? Is that what this says? What’s that?”

“It’s a little town in southern Chikyu. Quiet place. The nearest port town is Kaiko. If you’re interested, there’s an arena there that could use a good healer, not to mention the rest of the town. Old guy named Tei runs the fighting ring. You can tell him the girl with the face paint sent you.”

She turns the paper over in her hand, then slips it into a pocket of her robe. “This is more than I deserve.”

“Probably. Better option than turning to piracy, though.”

“But…why?” she asks. More tears threaten at the corners of her eyes. “I thought you were going to kill me. Why are you doing this?”

I’m not entirely sure I can answer that, but I give it a try. “Rei said something to me earlier that made a lot of sense. She usually makes sense when she’s not being frustrating. You’re not innocent by any means, and all of Kasai would probably be happy to kill you if the truth came out, but you were also a victim, in a way. You made one well-meaning, incredibly stupid mistake, and I don’t think you should have to die for that and the coercion that came after. There’s been too much death today as it is.” I put a hand on her shoulder. “I’ve already killed one person who wasn’t entirely responsible for his actions and I’m not in a rush to do it again. Think about Seizhon when you set out, if you haven’t already decided on a new home. Goodbye, Kania.”

“Goodbye, Avatar Kyoshi.”

Her mood seems lighter as I step out of the room. Still muted, but lighter. Kage’s waiting outside, plucking at the string of her bow. “That was a nice thing you did.”

“Don’t you ever sleep?” I ask.

“Not when there’s work to do! Had to deal with some treasonous sages. And I’m going to need that poison,” she says, and holds her hand out. I take the black lotus from my belt and give it to her. I don’t want the stuff, I was going to throw it into the ocean or something. “Thank you! Muryo’s waiting for you on the west balcony.”

“I know the route. Thanks for all your help, Kage.”

“It’s my job,” she says with a smile, and then melts into the shadows. I yawn and start toward the throne room.

For all her new energy, Muryo seems sad when I settle in beside her on the balcony. The still-darkened sky is slowly giving over to the light coming in from the far horizon. What a night. “Can I confirm what Kage reported?” she asks. “My grandfather is dead by his own hand?”

“He is. Nanuq said you didn’t see any benefit to exposing him after the fact.”

“Indeed,” she says, going a little red again when I mention Nanuq. “I think it best to reason his suicide as stress over the explosion. Not a full untruth, really. I don’t know how you view such things in Chikyu, but suicide is something of an absolving act in Hitenno. He will receive full funerary rites. My recovery and Kania’s departure will invite no formal comment.”

Muryo sighs deeply and looks out into the fading twilight. “I hope you understand that holding the ceremony I invited you for under the shadow of so much loss would be inauspicious. I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to apologize, Muryo. I understand. I think these few days in Kasai were more than enough for me for a while. But please, see that the servants and guards who died in the explosion get proper funerals, too. They were caught up in all this as much as anyone else.”

“Of course. I’ll be having all that moonflower ripped out at the temple, too…as soon as I find new head sages after the withdrawals of the current ones are announced.” There’s a bitterness in her voice at that. “Do you think your friend Rei would be interested in a promotion? I try not to meddle in the affairs of the sages, but it is in my power to restructure them to my liking. They allow for consorts too, Yun could go with her if she was so inclined.”

“Oh, they’re not—never mind.” I might mention that to them for a laugh later. A few dragonlings are starting to wake up near the lake, farther down from the balcony. “You’d have to ask her, but I don’t think she’d be very interested. She wanted to leave the sages if they were part of the conspiracy, and we were less than thrilled with her reception at the temple the other night, too.”

“So I heard. Very well. It would have been nice to have a woman as the High Sage, but I understand. Where do you think you’ll go now?” Muryo asks as she turns to me with a smile.

“We’ll have to talk about it. Nanuq’s brother Tiaraq is still in the Northern Water Tribe, we might go that way.”

She nods, then looks down at my cushion. “Ah, yes, Prince Nanuq. I wasn’t aware that he was…spoken for,” she says quietly. “The way he spoke of you was nothing less than glowing. He loves you very much, you know.”

The first rays of sunlight are only just appearing, but my whole body runs warm at that. “I love him, too.”


	31. Caoyan

_A few days later…_

A bison saddle’s not the most comfortable thing in the world to bed down on, even with blankets and quilts laid down, but at least Bima’s never tried to blow me up. As far as I know. Her eyes _are_ shifty sometimes, under all that fur. Conniving little bison. Spirits, I didn’t get enough sleep if I’m ready to accuse Bima of attempted murder.

Better than sleeping on the sand of the little outcropping we’ve found, out in the middle of nowhere. The place is less than a stone’s throw across and has no reference points around us to match on the map Muryo gave us. Yun’s our navigator, and by her reckoning we’re about half a day southeast of Plum Island, one of the landmasses south of Shangian Island, where the Western Air Temple is. We haven’t seen any other bison yet, but they might fill the skies when we start hugging the eastern parts of the archipelago. Trying to read all the little characters on the map makes my head hurt sometimes. Needn’t worry about that for a while, though. Dawn’s only just come, and the sun’s peeking out over the eastern horizon. Chikyu’s over there, somewhere off in the distance. Never thought I’d feel homesick, and I don’t, but in Seizhon people at least had the courtesy of making their violence straightforward. I’m not one for plots and politicking and secrets.

Nanuq’s leaning into my side where I’ve settled, sitting against cushions at the higher back lip of the saddle, and Yun’s dozing while nestled into my chest. Oh yes, I have a type…I ruffle Yun’s hair and look over at the other end of the saddle, where our Fire Sage—no, she’s not a Fire Sage any longer, she turned in her robes and wrote a few long letters of farewell to her home temple—where Rei is tossing and turning through some dream. She trembles from time to time, and I happen to think that a nice cuddle would do her some good, but she likes to sleep alone, and I’m not in a position to get up and go over there anyway. I wonder why she decided to come along with us to the Northern Water Tribe. Anyone watching us wouldn’t jump to imagine we’re the best of friends, but she got in the saddle along with us in Kasai and made no protest as we started north. Maybe she needs a change of scenery.

“You’re not very soft,” Nanuq says into my nightshirt, half-mumbling from sleepiness.

I scoff. “You fight earthbenders and build houses every day for three years and see how soft you are at the end. I thought you liked my muscles.”

One hand creeps up to my arm and squeezes. “I do. But not as a pillow.”

Everybody’s a critic. “Well, I’d offer you my chest, but—” I shift around a little, and Yun tightens her grip around my waist— “it’s occupied.”

“Greedy nun,” Nanuq murmurs, and moves so I can put my arm around him. He nestles back in, but Rei cries out and splits the calm over the little rock, throwing one arm in a wide arc over her body with flames to match. She sits up with a start, rousing us all to attention, then shrinks in place when she sees us looking at her. Rei puts one hand on her cheek, feeling at the skin there, then runs both hands down to her chest before they finally settle between her legs. All right, that’s more of a nightly routine for me, but to each their own. Nanuq tilts his head. “Are you…checking to make sure everything’s still in place?”

“Yes,” she says without a trace of sarcasm, and then she turns away from us. “A moment, please.”

We let her be while she goes through what look like her morning meditations. The wind picks up slightly, and her loose hair blows aside to show the sound chakra tattoo on the back of her neck. I’ll admit it, I like tattoos. Yun yawns and stretches without moving away from me at first, narrowly avoiding Nanuq with one fist, and then backs up a little so she isn’t sitting halfway on me. “Good morning,” I say, and she smiles as she wipes a tiny line of drool from the side of her mouth.

“Morning. Can’t believe you’re up before sunrise, Yoshi.”

_Yoshi? Really? All right, someone just got herself a new nickname._

_I will not hesitate to kill you if you call me that, Korra. We’ve been too long without an Earth Kingdom Avatar as it is._

“Someone’s nose was pressing into my tit for the last half an hour. How do you even breathe like that, anyway?”

She shrugs. “I manage.”

Rei sighs and turns toward us again, back to her usual lack of expression. “Are you all right?” Nanuq asks. Bad dreams?”

“Not bad. ‘Disorienting’ would be a more accurate way of putting it.” She pulls her legs out of her lotus position and relaxes. “I find myself as a man in a good deal of my dreams, and the veracity of it is…well. It usually occurs to me to check before the haze of waking wears off.”

I nod. “That happens to me sometimes. Throws off my balance. Come over here, no sense sitting by your lonesome when you have us to ground you.”

She purses her lips, but to our surprise she shifts her way across the saddle and nestles in opposite Nanuq, while Yun wedges in between me and him. Well, this is a pleasant surprise. It’s nice having all three of them curled up beside me. “You have plenty of male past lives influencing that for you. I shared a womb with my brother, and doubtless diving into Nanuq that day did me no favors—ah! Do not put your arm around me, this is for comfort, not romantic. I have no mind to help you round out your set.”

“All right, all right. Sorry.”

“Did you try to sleep with your earthbending teacher, too?” she asks, and my stomach flips over itself.

They all get thrown off-balance as I get up and out of the saddle. I’m almost biting through my tongue as I go to the far end of the island—although _far end_ and _island_ are generous ways of putting it—and throw some fire out over the water. It’s a good excuse for working up a sweat. My motions start out as a training form, one of Rei’s that I’ve adapted to include airbending, but I quickly lose all my elegance and before long it’s little more than a bunch of stomping about, throwing streams of fire into the surrounding sand and glassing it. When I’ve burned through all my chi for the morning, I sink slowly to my knees and splash a little seawater on my face. It’s salt-choked and it stings, but at least my whole face is streaked now.

I can feel their eyes on my back, concerned glances boring inquisitively through my shirt and into my spine. I’m not going to let them see me cower. Avatars don’t get to cower. The best I can do is sit at the tideline with my knees tucked up under my chin and my arms around my legs. None of them bother me, for a time.

Finally, and so suddenly that it almost begets the tears I’ve been holding back so well, a pair of slender arms wrap around me from behind before Yun’s cheek presses into the side of my neck. She’s warm like always, and she doesn’t pull away from the uncomfortable, clammy sweat on my skin. “I love you,” she breathes, and I put a hand over hers. “I love you so much.”

It’d be nice if that was all it took to solve someone’s problems. It helps. “I love you, too.”

The sand crunches beside us, and Nanuq sits down next to me with one hand near, but not touching, my thigh. I guess he grasps that a man touching me isn’t what I need right now. I bury my fingers by his in the sand, where he can feel me slightly warping it just by being there.

“That was…untoward of me.” Rei’s voice is unusually contrite. “I apologize, Kyoshi.”

“As far as I’m concerned, nothing in my life before I went to the Southern Air Temple is worth talking about. I wouldn’t keep any of those memories if I could, understand? Seizhon and learning earthbending and my family are closed doors.”

“Very well,” Rei says, and Nanuq nods.

Yun squeezes me tighter. “It’ll be all right. We’re your family now.”

I let my breath go, slowly, and we all sit there for a while, watching the tide go out.

⁂

The others are polite enough not to mention my little breakdown for the rest of the morning and afternoon. Yun occasionally consults Rei about the map and what part of the ocean we’re above, but otherwise the only sounds are the wind and Nanuq trying valiantly to teach me some conversational Shuishei. I didn’t expect to be fluent in a week or two, but I took to Hitennese quickly once I started getting lessons. It helped that Chikyan and Hitennese use the same writing system and set of sounds. Shuishei is full of hard sounds and combines words, and it’s hard to take Nanuq seriously when he sounds like he has a toad in his throat. I ought to be better than this, I was a Water Tribe man not twenty years ago.

“ _Kashandaranakhal_ ,” I repeat after him. “That’s a mouthful just to say _Avatar_.”

“That’s actually how you would say _tall beautiful lady_ , but it’s effectively the same thing.” So that’s what he’s been mumbling in his sleep. “The actual word is _Raavashon_.”

“This isn’t working, I can’t remember how the words are supposed to combine and run together. I feel like I’m not going to understand anything and end up smiling and nodding my way into a betrothal without you translating for me.”

“I’ll have to stick close by, then…but if you’re really worried about that, the word for marriage is _dolshuun_. If you hear anything like that, run away.”

“Wouldn’t you and Yun just jump in and fight them for me?” I ask. She chuckles from her spot on Bima’s neck.

“Strictly as a matter of honor, no blood. Come on, let’s try again. You ought to at least know a few words, and you learned Hitennese well enough to not make a fool of yourself in front of the Fire Lord. She loved you and almost weighed us down with money when we left.”

“I also wasn’t leaning on a bison with the wind and it was…after I…jumped into Rei’s body,” I say, and they all look at me as I trail off. “Almost like it was already somewhere in my head after that.”

Rei stops working with her hair and sets her brush down. “A good deal of language _is_ muscle memory,” she says. “The motions of the mouth and tongue. My thoughts are shaped by my first language, and borrowing my mind may have imparted some of that to you. That actually may not be an awful idea—hmm. Wait.”

She starts counting on her fingers and ignores my prompting to continue, so I turn back to Nanuq. “Any more kava?”

“I had a little bit, but my bag got incinerated at the palace and I didn’t think to buy any when we were stocking up in Kasai. There wasn’t enough for two people to make two trips anyway, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

I expect Rei to chime in at any moment to remind us that we don’t actually _need_ kava root to get into the spirit world, but she’s still counting something. “Maybe there’s some around the Western Air Temple,” I say. “It’s a plant with spiritual purposes and they grew it by the southern temple, after all. They’d probably throw the stuff at me if I asked. And who knows, there might even be…other uses.”

“There it is,” Rei says with a trace of exasperation, ignoring the way Nanuq sits up a little straighter at my suggestion. “It took fifty-one seconds for your thoughts on what could be a fascinating learning tool to turn licentious.”

“What? I’m only thinking out loud.” Yun looks back at us, but she’s too caught up in her snickering to say anything. “I won’t apologize for having the libido appropriate for a healthy young woman.”

“You have the libido appropriate for several healthy young women, Kyoshi. And a few men atop that,” Rei counters, but I can see the corner of her mouth turning up ever so slightly. “In any case, unless you want to give proper meditating another try, the point is moot until you can find more of that plant.”

“How is it that you manage to make it sound so dull?”

She huffs, and I go to the front of the saddle where I can lean over to talk to Yun. Don’t look down, Kyoshi. “Do you think the Western Air Temple would grow something like that?”

“They might, it grows on some of the islands around Patola and the climate here isn’t too different. Maybe they sell it in Caoyan,” she says, and turns to me while subtly shifting our course west, toward the large islands on the horizon. “I really don’t know what the Nishi temple is like, or what their abbess is like. She might also have an…undue interest in who likes to keep company with whom.”

I put a hand on her shoulder. “How about this. If anyone gives you any grief, I’ll beat them up. Most of them are pacifists, right?”

“Please don’t beat anyone up, Kyoshi.”

“Fine, just for you. We’ll try Caoyan first, all right? It’s sort of on the way.”

Fortunately, the map is with Rei so Yun can’t point out exactly how not on the way the temple and town are, and all she can do is tug on the reins and bring Bima onto a course with the largest island in the archipelago. I can’t blame her for not wanting to go to the temple right away, not after being expelled from one and ostracized at another. It seems like a silly thing to care about to me, she’s not royalty and expected to produce an heir, but most people I knew growing up cared more about getting enough food to survive. Maybe we were unusual like that.

The appearance of other bison is a good indicator that we’re heading in the right direction, but these bison are all low to the ground, if not actually on the ground already, and in tight groups near tree cover. Odd, everything I know about bison—and Yun made sure I knew a great deal before she ever let me fly Bima—would dictate them being up in the air, enjoying the calm weather. The wild bison around the Southern Air Temple loved flying and tried to do so no matter what the skies were like. Are they sick? Yun seems to notice too, and spends more time looking down than ahead until we clear most of the little valley where they had situated themselves.

“Are there sky bison that can’t fly?” I ask. Rei looks over the side of the saddle to see whatever it is I’m focused on, but then shivers and lies on her side until the dizziness starts to pass.

Yun shakes her head. “There were regular bison, but they were smaller and had brown fur, and they died out a long time ago. Maybe someone in Caoyan knows why those bison aren’t flying. They look so sad, huddled down there…”

I can feel our quick stopover getting longer, all of a sudden. “We’ll see.”

Some heavy winds necessitate a wide path around the mountain the Western Air Temple is built into so that we don’t get blown off-course. To hear Yun tell it, the temple itself is quite the accomplishment of architecture by one of the early Air Nomad Avatars, so I’d like to see it eventually, wind or no wind.

The mountains go very, very close to the coast, and a good portion of Caoyan seems to be built either on stilts or along winding, switchback paths that go almost a hundred feet up the mountainside. Creative, and the stilts seem indicative of Water Tribe influence, though I can’t help but think that they might’ve picked a less extreme place to settle. Oh well. I’m the Avatar, not the building inspector.

One foothill’s been flattened by earthbending, and Bima touches down there, almost shaking us off so she can lumber over to the knot of other bison congregated by some evergreens. There’s a bit of a walk to Caoyan proper along a smooth path that would look lovely in autumn, flanked on both sides by tall trees with leaves in a bright pallet of reds and yellows. As it is now, the trees have long since lost their leaves, and they won’t be back for several months yet. I’m glad we decided to get some warmer clothes before we left Kasai, there’s a bite on the wind that the shape of the path is only amplifying. Feels like rain, and there are clouds in the northern sky, but nothing seems to be coming.

“Did you stop in Patola when you left the South Pole, Nanuq?” Yun asks. He nods, and then she turns to Rei. “You’re the only one who’s going to see something new here, then.”

“So it would seem. But towns have a way of running together. Without the little trappings of different aesthetic sensibilities and accommodations for different kinds of bending, towns are merely people. People tend to be similar.”

Yun pouts, perhaps hoping to tease a sense of novelty out of Rei, but she remains as calm as ever. I always had an image of Hitennese natives being more…excitable, but Rei seems determined to keep her fire entirely on the inside. That’s fine. I know it’s in there.

The town of Caoyan itself is a bit livelier than its bison population, with a marketplace bustling through a midday rush while trade ships come into port on the raised docks. The money that Muryo gave us as a parting gift, a frankly embarrassing sum, is with Rei, and we end up falling in behind her as she makes note of the various stalls where we can pick up essentials for the rest of our trip. She even lets us stop for a late lunch at a little soup stand after we’ve perused most of the central market. The menu only has vegetarian offerings, I notice with a tinge of sadness. Or is it hunger? They feel so similar.

“I’ll be right with you,” the woman running the stand says as she stirs a big pot to keep its contents from settling. Her hair’s pulled into a braid and hanging over one shoulder, making plain the pale blue arrow running along the back of her neck. I didn’t expect to see many airbending masters away from the temples, especially one that seems to be around our age, even though all the nomads can bend. Maybe soup was her calling in life. Finally she turns around and casts a glance over our group. Definitely our age. Pretty. “What can I get…for…Yun?”

Our own airbending master’s mouth slowly widens in dawning comprehension as they look at each other. Her grip on the edge of the counter tightens, and her voice is suddenly dry. “Li?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Li, for those of you who don't remember, was Yun's old girlfriend that she mentions in Chapters 11 and 21. It's also the name of one of Kyoshi's old coworkers because I'm dumb and forgot not to use a name twice. There're a million Lis.
> 
> Some concept art from [AATKAW](aatkaw.tumblr.com) from when Rei actually was supposed to be a guy (and the token evil teammate) and get together with Nanuq. He would've been shirtless a lot because...I would've liked it. Still the pretty one of the group.


	32. The Root's The Thing

“YUN!”

The girl goes flying, actually flying propelled by her airbending, over the counter and catches Yun in something between a tackle and a hug. She doesn’t return her embrace at first out of shock, but after a moment she hugs the girl back while they’re lying there on the ground.

“I, ah, have things to put in the post,” Rei says, and she slips away before I have a chance to grab her. Traitor! Coward! Nanuq mumbles something about the docks, but I take a hold of his collar and he stays at my side. I am not going to be left to steep in this awkwardness alone.

“Li, what’re you…what’re you doing here?” Yun asks as they slowly get back to their feet. Her face is flushed, and she looks nervously back and forth between me and Nanuq. “I thought you got sent to the northern temple.”

Well, this is getting interesting. _Two_ renegade nuns. Sounds like the beginning of a bawdy joke, two renegade nuns walk into an inn. Li cocks an eyebrow, but she doesn’t unlink their hands, fingers still laced together between them. “I wasn’t about to listen to your mother, I changed my course as soon as Azuma was out of sight. You didn’t actually go to the Southern Air Temple, did you?”

She blinks a few times, then her shoulders slump a bit. “The teenage rebellion thing didn’t really occur to me, I guess. I was there up until about five months ago,” Yun says, and then takes notice of us again. “That’s where I was training the Avatar! This is her, this is the Avatar, Avatar Kyoshi. And that’s Nanuq, and the girl who ran off before is Rei. Kyoshi, this is my, um…Li.”

“It’s a pleasure,” I say with a slight bow and a fist against my palm. She nods her head in return, apparently unwilling to take her hands away from Yun. “I had a Li as well, once. He wasn’t nearly as cute as you.”

He was also quite unpleasant and tried grabbing at me more than once, but that doesn’t really bear mentioning to them. I’m a little curious to see how long Yun is going to let this go on before letting Li know that we’re lovers. She doesn’t seem to be in any hurry, but maybe that’s just her shock wearing off. Maybe we’ll need to have that conversation about other people after all.

“So what brings you to Caoyan?” Li asks, and even though the question was obviously directed toward Yun, I think my answer might be slightly more poignant.

“Well, we _were_ getting soup…” I say. Romantic entanglements notwithstanding, I’m hungry.

She nods, reluctantly lets go of Yun’s hand, and hops over the counter again. Li ladles off three large bowls for us, and even without any meat in it the stuff smells pretty good. “Thanks,” I say, and reach for my belt. “Damn it, Rei has all the money.”

“I’ll go find her,” Nanuq says, but Li waves us off.

“Please, it’s on me. Least I can do for you bringing Yun all the way here.”

Something tells me we might still end up paying, but I’ve never been one to turn down free food. And busying myself with lunch makes it harder to notice Yun’s nervous looks that occasionally flit over to us.

“We were actually on our way to the Northern Water Tribe,” Yun says, trying to keep things at least a little formal, “but we stopped here to see if anyone was selling any kava root. Kyoshi thinks it might be a good…learning tool.”

“Kava? The one that helps you slip into the spirit world? Let me think.” Despite some obvious eagerness to go back over to Yun, Li starts stirring the broth again while she ponders it. “It’s pretty difficult to grow. I think they cultivate some up at the temple, but I’ve never seen any of the nuns down here selling it. You could always try just meditating into the spirit world.”

“Yeah, I’m not so good at that. Lots of past lives knocking around, makes it kind of hard to clear my mind. Guess we can try at the temple once we get Rei—or we could leave her here, since she seems to be so fond of running off on her own.”

“I wouldn’t recommend that,” Li says with none of her previous bubbliness. “The skies around the temple aren’t very safe right now except in the early morning, and there’s no other way up there.”

“Might explain why the bison were all huddled on the ground,” Nanuq says in between spoonfuls. “They’re scared of something?”

Unfortunately, Li doesn’t understand his more heavily accented Hitennese, so Yun translates it into what I assume is Tochi. “Well, yes, they’re scared of the dragon.”

That makes us all raise an eyebrow. “A dragon this far from the Fire Nation?” I ask.

Li shrugs and nods. “I don’t know how it got all the way out here, but it has no competition and the whole mountain to itself.” She points to the highest peak, the one the temple is supposed to be built into. “It already killed four bison and the rest aren’t flying now, so they can’t finish their mating season.”

They need to fly to mate? How does that even…I try to shake my head clear, in vain. I don’t think I’m going to be able to get _that_ image out of my head for a while. Yun shivers. “We flew in, we could’ve been attacked on that whole approach,” she says.

“In fairness, we don’t get attacked very often.” Of course, we’ve only ever been close to a dragon hatchling, not a fully grown hunter-killer. “But I guess we can wait until the early morning to go up there.”

Yun’s head picks up from her soup, having seen around the corner of my statement, and Li’s going to make her cheeks sore with that kind of smile. “Well, I’d be happy to put you up if you don’t already have a place to stay…”

I’m not even sure if there are inns in Air Nomad towns. The traders I’ve seen seem to either sleep on their ships or move on in the same day. For a supposedly itinerant population, they don’t seem to have much in the way of temporary housing. I suppose I could simply bend us a shelter, but I’m more than a little curious to see how long Yun will let this continue. I’m sure at some point Li’s going to try to do something more than hug her. Getting possessive would be the tiniest bit hypocritical of me, wouldn’t it?

“That’s very generous of you,” I say. “We’d be happy to accept.”

Yun shrinks in her seat, but Li brightens up. “Great! I’ll be here for another two hours or so, but we can go after that. The post station is down near the docks, if you want to find your friend. I have to start mixing tomorrow’s broth, I’ll be back.”

She smiles once more at Yun and then disappears behind a curtain, to the rest of her shop. Yun and Nanuq are both looking at me, but I still have soup to finish. Once I’m done, I set the bowl back down and take a few steps from the stand. “That was good. Needed beef. Or pork. Anything like that, really.”

“What are you doing?” Yun asks under her breath. Her hands are in her sleeves, but I can tell she’s wringing them in there.

“Getting us a place to stay. You heard Li, we can’t go flying around with a dragon awake and prowling. And it seemed like you two had more catching up to do, because she really seems like she’s expecting to pick up with you where you had to leave off. Were you planning on mentioning you were involved?”

Yun bites her lip and looks down at my boots. “I was waiting for the right moment,” she mumbles, and Nanuq puts a hand on her shoulder. “I…I love her, I don’t want to hurt her like that.”

Oh, matters of the heart. Fighting’s easier, frankly. “Do you think it’ll be better the longer we keep it from her? Look, I’m hardly in a position to tell you not to pursue your feelings, but you at least have to be honest with her. Otherwise she might think you’ll stick around here once we check out the temple.”

She cocks an eyebrow as she realizes what I’m saying. “Really? You wouldn’t mind?”

I look over at Nanuq for a moment. “It’s not like I’m unfamiliar with the concept of sharing. Just give her the truth later. Come on, let’s go find Rei.”

As it happens, we don’t have to look far. We’re already near the docks, and the post station is right where Li said it was, on the water with its own pier. Our resident firebender is adjusting her satchel when she sees us. “Did you all have your fill of soup?” she asks.

“Yes. And thanks for running off, by the way. You took your sweet time down here.”

“There was a line,” Rei says flatly. “And forgive me for not wanting to get in the middle of that entanglement. It seemed like a matter for _your_ relationship to resolve, and as I keep informing you, I am not part of your relationship.”

Give it time, Rei. “And while I was in line, I spoke with a few women whose Hitennese was passable. It seems that no one here sells kava, though they may have some at the temple. The only issue with getting there—”

“The dragon, we heard,” I say. “We can head out at dawn. Li offered to put us up for the night.”

“An interesting night then, to be sure.”

Yun sticks her tongue out at Rei as we ask around among the foreign traders in one more attempt to find some kava without heading all the way up the mountain. I can almost feel a good deed coming on if we go to the temple. Despite our search, it seems that the nuns have a monopoly on the stuff. Maybe it would’ve been better if I just let Nanuq translate for me…oh well. I wasn’t looking forward to sleeping in Bima’s saddle again, anyway.

The sun’s long since disappeared behind the mountain when we return to the soup stand, where Li is shuttering the openings. Little paper lamps are casting soft red light over the streets, thinning of their pedestrians and giving all of Caoyan an impossibly small, sleepy feel. Sunset hardly stopped Kasai or even Seizhon from bustling, but much like Patola, this temple town doesn’t have much to do at night. No one drinks, no one fights. How dreadfully boring. Li runs up to Yun when she sees us, and Rei almost cringes beside Nanuq. As annoying as her disappearance was, I’m not sure I can blame her. “Ready to go?” Li asks, and I nod.

“Lead on.”

Her house isn’t far, a small wood-and-earth building nestled between two others in the foothills just south of the town proper. Rei lights a candle near the door with a flick of her fingers when we walk inside, and I see the space is split up into a few small rooms. I’ve never actually seen the inside of Air Nomad homes, but I thought they wouldn’t have interior walls.

“So the washroom is through there, and I’m pretty sure this futon can sleep three,” Li says as she pushes a low table out of the way so she can unroll the futon. She glances quickly at me. “Your feet might hang off a little, though.”

“Yeah, I’m used to it.”

“Anyone want tea?” she asks, and goes to ladle some water into a pot. Once it’s on the heat and we’ve settled in, she goes and sits by Yun. Rei tries to get up again, but I grab her wrist where I know there aren’t any burns. “Can’t believe you trained the Avatar and they never gave you your arrows for that.”

“I never asked for them, and the monks at the Jongmu Temple never offered. But you got yours here? I can see the curve in the arrowheads and the softened points.”

It surprises me how in-depth they get about tattoos, but Rei and Nanuq actually seem interested as they start discussing them. Maybe I don’t understand because I don’t have any. If I can find a patch of skin that isn’t crisscrossed with scars, I might think about getting some. The teapot starts whistling after a while, and the ginseng tastes all right. Of course, we finish that eventually, and then we’re left only with the evening’s inevitable conclusion. Yun is staring into her teacup, perhaps trying to set the dregs on fire, and I think Rei actually squeaks. For heaven’s sake, Takarabe, pull it together. Anyone watching would think she’s the one about to get cuckolded.

“Well, uh, my room is through there,” Li says with a thumb over her shoulder to one of the curtained doorways at the back of the main space, and then her other hand falls over Yun’s. “So—”

“Wait.”

Li draws back a bit with a curious tilt of her head. Rei shrinks on my other side so she’s out of the line of sight for the incoming debacle, and Nanuq and I have to wade through it. Yun runs a hand through her hair. “Li, I love you, but the truth is that I’m…I’m with Kyoshi now,” she stammers out, looking down at her hands all the while.

“Oh.”

These poor Air Nomads always look like they’ve been smacked in these kinds of situations. Li looks over at me, her gaze flitting up and down my body, and then she tucks her hands into her sleeves. “I kind of thought you were with Nanuq.”

“I am.”

She blinks for a few moments, and Rei groans behind me. “I’m confused.”

“Ah—we both are,” Yun says, and she lays her hand over Li’s again. “We talked about this earlier…I just didn’t want you to think that I was going to stay here, whatever we end up doing.”

That makes her perk up a bit and look hopefully at Yun, but it’s tempered by the knowledge that this is only a stopover. “So what is it you want to do?”

“Just don’t be too loud,” I say, and lie down across the futon. My feet go off the end, as expected. I should’ve asked Muryo for an extra-long bedroll. “We’ve got to get up early if we’re going to the temple.”

Nanuq starts letting out most of his hair and Rei, still looking anywhere but at us, shuffles onto the bare floor to undo her braid. “Thank you,” Yun whispers before she follows Li into the next room.

“That was nice of you,” Nanuq says as he curls up next to me, all firm and warm.

“Why do you all assume I can’t share?”

Rei shuffles out of her outermost robe, leaving only the slightly snugger undershirt and pants hugging her body. “That was not as uncomfortable as it could have been thanks to the utter lack of jealousy the three of you seem to have, but please tell me we are seeking other accommodations tomorrow night.”

“We’ll see how things go at the temple. And you don’t have to sleep on the floor, you know. There’s still room here.”

“Must you?” she asks.

“It’s not that I _must_ …I only thought it would be more comfortable for you than the hard floor. Crick your neck if you feel the need to prove a point, it’s no skin off my nose. But don’t complain about it tomorrow.”

She grumbles, a low sound in her throat that comes out more like a purr than she probably cares to admit, but ultimately she lies down at the edge of the futon, with her chest facing Nanuq’s back so he’s in between us. “Do. Not. Cuddle me.”

“As you like,” I tell her, and grab Nanuq’s leg to pull him as close as I can. We’re awake a little while longer, touching one another, kissing, enjoying the closeness, and eventually Rei’s arm drapes over the both of us among her sleepy little breaths. Give it time, Rei.

⁂

I must have pulled off my shirt at some point in the night, because it’s laying across Nanuq’s shoulder when I wake up. That, or one of them got handsy while I was asleep. Once I get it back on, I sit up and take a look around. Rei’s meditating, Nanuq is grasping at the now-empty space I was just occupying, and someone’s in the washroom. Yun comes out of there a moment later, straightening her robe and fixing her pendant as a little water drips from the ends of her hair.

“Morning,” she says through a yawn.

“Good morning. Have fun? You didn’t wear that poor girl out, did you?”

She shakes her head and sits a little ways off the futon, where she starts airbending her hair dry. Why didn’t I ever think of doing that? “We didn’t…we talked, mostly. Cuddled like we used to. But we didn’t have sex, if that’s what you’re asking. Too much potential for hurt feelings. She wanted me to say goodbye for her, she had to go open her stall.”

Yun sighs, but Rei cuts me off before I can respond. “We should get back to Bima if we want to get to the temple while we still have a window of safety.”

“Right, right. Come on, Your Highness,” I say, and lightly push my foot into Nanuq’s stomach. His laugh starts out as a sputtering snicker, and then he’s rolling around on the futon, trying to keep from getting tickled. “Good, you’re up! Put on something warm, it’s flying time.”

Once we’ve gotten ourselves presentable and put everything back the way we found it, we head out and back to the path leading to the bison. Caoyan seems to be up and moving already, even with the sun only just peeking out from over the eastern sea. A whole culture full of morning people…I shudder at the thought. At least the walkway back to the landing area is quiet. There’s quite a bit of commotion coming from the end of the trail, enough to make the ground tremble lightly every few moments. Rei cocks an eyebrow. “Bison irritated at being stuck on the ground?”

“No, mating season,” Yun says exasperatedly, and then she stands up straighter and takes off running ahead of us. “I can’t afford feed for a bison calf!”

“Anyone want to try climbing the mountain instead?” I ask. Rei and Nanuq seem to be considering it, but then we arrive at the far end of the path where about two dozen bison are lolling about. Bima is resting on the ground by the landing platform, in the middle of a group of bulls and quite obviously enjoying the attention.

_How do you know what Bima was thinking?_

_Have you ever been around a flying bison cow in heat, Korra? The smell is like a wet, sticky punch in the face. It’s not something you forget._

“Go on! Shoo!” Yun starts blowing annoying, but not actually harmful, puffs of air at Bima’s suitors, much to the annoyance of all the bison involved. Most of them snort and go on their way, though Bima seems more put out than irritated, and she buries her face in her front paws. Looks like no one’s having very much fun in Caoyan. “Come on, you know we can’t go flying around the world if I think you’re going to whelp whenever we hit an air pocket.”

Bima snorts, pokes one eye out to look at Yun, and then hides again. Not a completely unwarranted response, really, if a bit immature. “Bima, let’s go, we have to get up to the temple. I’m sure there are plenty of…sufficiently musky boy bison up there, and you can have your pick after you chew on some ginseng root. And once we’re upwind, ugh. This stuff really smells good to you?”

That seems to serve to brighten her up, and she lists to one side long enough for us to hop into the saddle. Climbing the mountain still doesn’t seem like a bad idea, I can hardly breathe with all this musk hanging in the air. I can only hope that flying will get us away from the worst of it. “Ginseng root?” I ask.

“It’s the only reason there’s not a trail of little bison following us around,” Yun says. She cracks the reins, and we start lifting off the ground. “Most of the bison at the southern temple were male, too.”

Another lovely image to scour from my mind as soon as possible. Once we start flying in earnest and the air around us gets a little clearer, Nanuq stops gagging and we keep an eye out on all sides for any dragons. I suppose it’s not such a ridiculous notion as it seemed at first blush, there’s no shortage of prey or roosting spots. Still a little ridiculous, though.

“You really have to see this temple, Kyoshi,” Yun says, and I lean over the front of the saddle while Bima clears the side of a steep escarpment and gets to our final approach. “See it there?”

“No, there’s nothing on—what in the hell?”

The damn temple is upside-down. Not carved into the side of the mountain, not built into some kind of hollow, upside-down. What idiot takes a regular construction and then turns it on its ear? It looks like it would only take one very angry, very dedicated earthbender to detach the pagodas and send them careening to the ground thousands of feet below. Good thing I’m the level-headed sort. No bison out and about in the surrounding area either, I notice. Why am I still thinking about bison? Argh.

“Say what you like about Fire Nation temples, we never invert them,” Rei says. “Ah, Kyoshi?”

“This had to be some Air Nomad Avatar showing off, there’s no way anyone convinced a team of earthbenders to do this. And when I figure out how to manifest them I’m going to find out which one it was and try knocking some sense into them.”

“Kyoshi…”

“I think it’s unique,” Yun says in a mock huff. “And how do you know the spirits didn’t guide them to this spot? Or even start building it for them?”

“Kyoshi—”

“It’s a monument to human arrogance, that’s what it is! I could pull down every building there if I had a mind to.”

“Kyoshi!” Rei shouts as best she can with her scarred voice, and lightning cracks in the distance. “Dragon!”

Oh, shit.

A bright red, serpentine shape is barreling toward us from the top of the highest mountain nearby, fangs bared and getting much, much larger with each passing second. Yun pulls on the reins until Bima starts listing the other way, but it’s hardly enough to get out of the path of its fire if it starts shooting off. No earth at hand hundreds of feet in the air, and fire probably wouldn’t do much to it…I take my fans and try to spin up enough of a wind to at least turn any flames away.

Nanuq doesn’t have much in his water skin, but he’s able to coalesce what he does have into a storm of little spikes, held ready above the saddle. All Rei can do is get herself to the front of the saddle and try to hold on while we tilt to an almost dangerous slope, and every clenching second is bringing the shape closer until the details are easy to pick out. Its mouth opens, reds and oranges spilling out, and then something starts burning in my chest.

Arms—my arms, but also not my arms—swing in a wide arc, fans extended, and the wind howls around us. It’s hard to see anything but painful white light and hear anything but the rush of the air by my ears. When I start adjusting, I can see the whole awing length of the dragon twisting with the wind, being forced downward, flicking its tail angrily as it goes soaring into the valley below us.

The wind stops screaming and returns to its previous idyll as quickly as it had turned foul. My whole body relaxes, as if I’d been holding every muscle as tightly as I could, but pain starts flooding through my head, wave after sickening wave. Suddenly the sun is too bright, my clothes are too rough against my skin, and my energy is just…gone. My whole body crumples, and someone manages to catch me before I strike my neck on the lip of the saddle. It hurts when their hand strokes through my hair, rough and tugging at my scalp. Somewhere, impossibly distant, the dragon roars.

Sometimes I hate being the Avatar.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well too bad, it's your job and I'm your writer


	33. Lesser Convergence

When I come to, I’m very obviously not in a bison saddle.

For starters, whatever I’m lying on is much softer than the saddle, warmer and more supportive. Feels like a bed. And there’s no rushing wind or screeching dragons, so at least it’s an improvement. I feel around with my hand until it hits upon some stone, and I tap it a few times to get a feel for where I am. A small room in a honeycomb of small rooms, stretching out farther than I can sense. Did we die? Is this the afterlife? Or maybe some Hitennese crèche since I’m never allowed to stop reincarnating—

“I’m glad you’re finally awake, grandmother.”

There’s an Air Nomad woman standing in the doorway, maybe sixty or so with a few streaks of gray in her partly-shaved hair. Her arrows, too, have a slight curve to the lines, and a light yellow cord is draped over her shoulders. I try to sit up, but that makes everything a little woozy.

“Unless I was out for a really long time, I’m no one’s grandmother,” I say. Nanuq’s got some explaining to do otherwise.

She draws her hands out of her robes and holds them up in a conciliatory gesture. “Well, not _you_ exactly, Avatar Kyoshi.”

“Wait, wait.” My head’s a little fuzzy as I try to sit up again, but I go slower this time, and once more the world isn’t on a tilt. “I saw the family tree when we were at the palace. Princess Fai?”

I rub my head while she takes a few steps into the room and nods to a cup of water left by my bed. Nice and cold. “Not that I could ever claim the throne for myself, but yes, I’m part of the imperial family through my father. Fire Lord Kozei and Avatar Yangchen were his parents. I prefer _Abbess_ , though.”

Another cousin for Yun. “Oh, Rei’s gonna love you…”

“Your firebender friend?” she asks, sitting down on a cushion near me. “Yes, she also knew who I was. The others seemed to find her enthusiasm frightening, for some reason.”

“She’s a big fan of your grandmother. A really big fan. So we made it to the Western Air Temple? We didn’t crash and knock loose one of those awfully-designed buildings?”

Fai cocks an eyebrow and sits up a little straighter. “I’ll remind you that you’re in one of those buildings right now. And they’re not in the habit of getting knocked loose, they’re very securely anchored.”

I hope she doesn’t expect me to hold the temple up if it starts falling because of that dragon. If she likes it, then I’m not going to pick at the weird construction. “Fine, fine. My friends, are they all right? Yun’s bison?”

“Everyone’s fine,” she says in a somewhat more soothing voice now that she’s not on the defensive, then holds a hand out. “Come and see for yourself. Mind the bison though, they’re a bit agitated right now. And try not to get too close to anything even vaguely bison-shaped, or they might get territorial.”

“Anything else?” I ask as I get up. She’s tiny, like Yun. Tiny nuns. I could put her on my shoulders without a thought if I wanted to.

“Try not to sit down on anything outside.” She shivers. “It might be sticky.”

We need to get out of here.

“Did Yun or Nanuq tell you why we came here? Maybe Rei mentioned it when she took a break from her excited squealing? The kava root?”

“No, they were more worried about you than informing me of why you came here,” Fai says as we leave the small room and emerge out into a covered hall somewhere within the mountain. “Not that you aren’t welcome simply because, of course. It’s a great honor to host the Avatar. But kava root, you said? For getting into the spirit world? You could always just meditate in, you know.”

“Abbess Fai.”

She turns back to look at me. “As much as I enjoy effacing myself, I usually only like to say this once: I cannot meditate to save my life. I hope you believe me when I say that I’ve made a good faith effort to do so, but it just doesn’t happen. Nanuq and I are very eager to see if this really does help with learning another language like we think it might, but it’s not going to happen without some of that root to gnaw on.”

My candor seems to have stunned her into silence for a moment, but she recovers, and we keep on walking through the halls. “I see. Well, as happy as I would normally be to help you with this, the dragon has made harvesting the kava atop the mountain somewhat problematic. Even if our stores of it weren’t dry, I’d be hesitant. The last time we gave out a bushel of kava to an Avatar, we ended up with more than a few pregnant nuns. That was about thirty years ago.”

Damn it, Kuruk. Even from the grave he’s causing me problems. “I don’t know if anyone’s let it slip to you yet, but I can’t get any nuns pregnant. I’m on the other side of that process.”

She shrugs. “The initial message we received from the Southern Air Temple never once mentioned your sex. No one here had ever heard of anyone with your name, and combined with the fact that you were training with the monks, more than a few of us thought you were a man. We placed bets!”

“I’m glad I could spark such wild speculation,” I lie. “But to get back to the kava?”

“Like I said, we have none at the moment. If, perhaps, we were able to go and harvest some before the winter has a chance to set in more and kill our crop, I would be able to give you whatever you need. But that would require dealing with the dragon, something beyond our abilities.”

I knew I felt a good deed coming on when we got into Caoyan. “All right, I guess I can’t leave a dragon wreaking havoc on the bison population. I’ll tell the others. You were just kidding about not sitting down on anything outside, right?”

“I was not.”

Stupid horny bison. The hall we’re in opens to a courtyard on ‘top’ of an eave, which is just so architecturally wrong that I have to bite my tongue to keep from saying something. Yun and Nanuq are watching some bison congregated on another temple building separated from us by a rickety rope bridge, while Rei almost immediately fastens herself to Fai’s side with—is that a smile? That’s a little frightening.

“Yeah, I’m fine, don’t worry about me, Rei.”

“I already expressed my concern while you were resting,” she says, but then reaches over and pats my hand. “I am glad to see you up and about, though.”

“She’s all yours, abbess.” Fai gives me the good-natured smile of a put-upon woman as Rei starts firing off questions and I walk away. We’re on stone, and it’s easy enough for me to mask my footsteps enough for Yun and Nanuq not to notice me until I’m right behind them. “I hope you two didn’t sit on anything out here.”

They turn around before I’ve even finished speaking and almost fall into me, poor things. I put them both in a good strong hug and ease us all back from the edge of the courtyard. Who builds _under_ a cliff, honestly? “All right, all right, you’d think I was asleep for a year. What was it, just a month or two?”

“Three hours,” Yun says, her voice muffled in my clothes.

“Well, I’m alive, as you can see. There’s good news and bad news, which do you want first?”

They look at each other, and then back up to me. Nanuq’s grip on my side tightens ever so slightly. “The good news, I guess?”

“We’ll be able to get our kava,” I say. Nanuq nods and smiles. “The bad news is that we have to deal with the dragon to get at it.”

“I think that goes more into the realm of ‘very bad news,’ Kyoshi,” he mumbles.

Yun doesn’t look any more enthused than he does. “How do you mean, deal with it?”

“We can’t have a pet dragon, can we?” I’d be lying if I told them I never dreamed of having a dragon.

“No! It’d eat Bima!”

“Then I guess we’ll have to kill it,” I say. “I don’t know how to drive off a dragon once it’s roosted somewhere like this, and there’d be nothing stopping it from coming back even if we managed to do that.”

It seems a shame to have to kill such a noble creature, but we don’t seem to have an option if I want to help the temple. Damn my good nature. Somehow I pull Rei off the abbess and bring them all to the library to see if we can find anything about dragons and how to deal with them. Firebending seems off the table, but perhaps there’s a solution more elegant than hurling large rocks at it. I can stumble through most of the texts written in Hitennese, but the majority of them are in Tochi, and of that I only know what I needed to get by at the Southern Air Temple with the few people who didn’t speak Chikyan. Yun’s stuck reading most of those in a dialect she isn’t very familiar with, and Nanuq screens everything for illustrations of dragons or the word for _dragon_ in various languages. Everyone has their part to play. Rei even manages to convince some of the nuns managing the library to help us search, though after seeing how red their faces were once she spoke with them I’m not sure I want to know what she said to get their assistance.

“Anything yet?” I ask. Please let there be something, this is a big library and I don’t want to be here all night.

Yun looks up from the scroll she was poring over and shakes her head. “This is a recipe for a flavor of kaoliang called ‘Dancing Dragon,’ not really useful.”

“Does it look like it’s any good?”

She purses her lips and pulls another scroll over. “This one seems to be about _hunting_ dragons,” Rei says, and brings it over to me. “Though much is made about surprise being a crucial element. It also recommends large teams of mostly earthbenders, since firebending is of little use against them. Water can work somewhat, but each commentator takes pains to extol the virtues of causing a landslide on them.”

“Well, I’m the only earthbender around here, so I’ll have to do. Do you think you had better hang back from this one, since firebending isn’t any good against them?”

“Dragons are still ancient spirits, I may yet be of some use. If you could tap into the Avatar state reliably, I would like our chances better, but…you cannot,” she says flatly.

“I just did it a few hours ago, you don’t have to act like I’m totally useless. You’d be surprised what I can do given enough stress.”

Rei turns back to the scroll and traces over the words with her fingers. “Should I assume all that gasping and moaning at night is the three of you trying to, ah, induce the Avatar state?”

Yun pulls her collar up around her reddening neck and Nanuq has to steady himself to keep from falling over. “You’re very close to being left here with the angry horny bison, Rei.”

She rolls her eyes. I liked her better when she was giddily peppering the abbess with questions. “Do you really imagine that as some kind of threat…I will ask for a room set away from yours so you can have your privacy, then. We should set out before dawn, dragons are weaker during twilight.”

“Why not go at sundown?” Nanuq asks. “Wouldn’t it be stronger during the day?”

“You will not find a dragon in darkness that does not want to be found.”

And with that oddly threatening bit of sageliness, Rei pushes the scroll toward me and disappears among the stacks of shelves. Probably off to look for more Yangchen memorabilia. There was a point in all that, though. It’s nearly sunset to judge by the color of the sky through the long slit windows on the wall, and I’ll need at least a few more hours to work off this headache. We can get something to eat, too. I put the one useful scroll in my belt, and we’re rolling up the rest when a sudden realization hits me. “Oh, no…”

Yun cocks an eyebrow. “What’s the matter?”

“There’s no meat here, is there?”

“The tofu is perfectly good, and I’m sure they have that sauce you like. You don’t need meat to live, Kyoshi.”

“Maybe _you_ don’t,” I grumble. “We might as well see what’s available, my eyes are starting to hurt from looking at all these scrolls.”

⁂

Sometimes I’m happy to live down to Rei’s expectations of me, and usually Yun is more than eager to help me do so. I think this makes three temples we’ve debauched, but only the first one where I’ve actually worried about causing a catastrophic structural failure. Nanuq was courteous enough to busy himself with showing off waterbending in the dining hall to some of the more curious nuns for a while—we really need to work out some kind of system for this, it won’t do to all but kick someone out of bed any time the other two are in the mood—and Rei, true to her word, found some quarters near the abbess. I’m sure that was thrilling for both of them.

“You seem nervous,” Nanuq says, half his face buried in my arm. I had to go pull him out of the dining hall eventually, he was too polite to simply come knock on the door and see if he could come to bed.

“Mmhmm. It’s rare that I have to fight anything bigger than me. And something that can breathe fire.”

“We’ll be there, too.”

I squeeze his leg. “Thanks. Come on, let’s try and get some sleep.”

He nestles in with a short sigh, and Yun’s already clamped to my other side, so there isn’t much to do except listen to the occasional sonorous whimper from the bison stables.

It isn’t until they start yelping and screaming a few hours later that I know something’s wrong.

The whole temple shudders with the force of dozens of bison trying to move and take off all at once, and for a moment my heart clenches when I think the temple is going to come down. Yun and Nanuq jolt awake after me, and the bed sheets go flying so we can get up. Nightclothes will have to do, and I grab my fans before we run out into the hall.

“If they’re just getting their mating season over with, I swear…”

“They don’t do that at night,” Yun says. “Something must have spooked them.”

We start heading for the stables, along with a few other nuns who came out of their dormitories, when part of the wall near us starts—twisting?—and a misshapen little body with a sickly violet glow about it comes halfway out of the brick.

Should’ve just stuck with the Shuishei lessons.

Whatever the hell it is, it doesn’t look very friendly, with most of what I assume is its face taken up by a large, snapping jaw. A spirit, it has to be. I try fire, Yun and I try air, but both elements simply pass through what constitutes its body with a ripple. Oh, what did Rei say in her story about the spirits…air and fire are one group, and if those do nothing, then these spirits must respond to earth and water. I hope the building doesn’t come down as I pull a few bricks from the wall and force them together with the spirit in between. It dissipates with a stomach-turning _squelch_ , but it does disappear.

So Nanuq and I are the only ones who can deal with spirits. In this entire temple. Wonderful.

“Did something happen here?” Rei asks, coming up behind us in some hastily-donned nightclothes. There’s a shriek and a loud blast of air from the outside, and she follows along with us as we go.

“Spirits, unfriendly ones,” I say. Why can’t we run into nice spirits for once? “Nanuq, go and get the water skins, air and fire aren’t going to do anything to these things.”

He takes my fans as well and heads back to the room as the rest of us get outside. In the small bubbles of light left by the candles and torches scattered about, small angry spirits are spinning and whirling with awful, ethereal noises. A few of them are doing nothing more than twirling about, but most of them are snapping their jaws at anyone who gets too close or chasing the lumbering bison around. I don’t care how securely these buildings are anchored into the mountain, a bunch of skittish things that weigh that much are going to be a problem.

A few of the more excitable nuns had the same idea as us, but their blasts of wind don’t do anything to the specters, apart from annoy them and give them better targets. “They’ll have to throw rocks or water if they want to do something,” I say, and pull up a few, hopefully non-load bearing, stones from the courtyard floor. I crumble all but two into smaller pieces to make some projectiles for everyone and set about squishing the rest of the spirits like so many bugs.

Rei and Yun pass on the message that airbending isn’t of much use against these things, but that means that I’m their only target after a few minutes of swatting them. They don’t…hurt, exactly, maybe because they’re so small or because I have a much more powerful spirit sharing my body, but their bites are still an unpleasant, chilly pressure passing through my arms and legs.

It’s worse when they start learning. One of them will grab at my sleeve, then slip away when I try to strike it with a rock so I hit myself. Nanuq returns eventually with the water skins, batting away the little monsters with cold, wet whips, and I use mine to start capturing them in bubbles. They seem to respond very poorly to any kind of pressure, and pushing the bubbles in on them is enough to make them disappear in a haze of violet smoke.

Freezing rain starts falling off in the valley, and thankfully the cliffs protect us from most of it as we work across the main temple building, but it still makes the air around us cold and wet. Nanuq doesn’t seem to mind, and he’s able to actually pull some of the moisture out of the air to use. I’ve got to learn that one.

There have to be at least two hundred little spirits running amok in the temple, and another three dozen or so in the stables. All the bison are hovering nervously around the building while we clear it out, and Nanuq and I don’t even get a thankful snort when they clamber over one another to get back inside and away from the rain. Rei is hunched over some of the residue left by the spirits when we return, rolling it between her fingers before wiping it off on the floor with a grimace.

“Any ideas why spirits just started popping up out of nowhere and bothering everyone?” I ask as I rest against one of the columns in the courtyard.

“Your mere presence thins the barrier between the worlds, as does mine to a lesser degree. The winter solstice would have done so as well for a few days before and after, and this is a highly energetic site to begin with, but nothing should have broken through, unless…”

I can feel her gaze on me without even looking, accusing me all over again. Unless the veil was weak to begin with. Unless a spirit had already passed through it because of a meddling Avatar that was desperate and too easily tricked. Her indictment stings more than I think it will.

“Is everyone all right?”

Abbess Fai has her hair all akilter as she comes up to us, the image of disrupted tranquility. Rei perks up at her presence, her ire forgotten for now. “A minor convergence event, it would seem,” she says, with no mention of my possible complicity in causing it. “Kyoshi and Prince Nanuq managed to contain the spirits that extruded.”

“Well, thank you both,” she says with a bow. “Was this the dragon’s doing?”

Rei shakes her head and wraps her arms around her torso, suddenly aware of the cold and her insufficient clothing. “Dragons do not thrall lesser spirits. If it meant to send a message, it would do so itself. I would hazard that this was…unrelated.”

She can give me that dirty look all she likes, it’s not going to change anything. “Wake us if this happens again,” I say, and gather up Yun and Nanuq. “Otherwise, we’re going to try and get some sleep before dawn.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun fact: This chapter includes only the second colon in the body of this entire fic (the first was in Chapter 15). I really, really dislike colons, semicolons, and parentheses in prose.


	34. Beasts

It’s cold, misty pre-dawn when we set out from the temple.

There were no more spirit attacks, or convergence events as Rei calls them, but I still didn’t get much sleep after the excitement despite a pressing soreness in my arms and legs. We all simply collapsed when we got back to our room, meaning a lot of stiff limbs and cricked necks. Sleeping in a pile is overrated.

With some heavily sauced tofu to tide us over, Fai shows us the path that leads up along the cliff face and onto the mountaintop. It’s narrow, almost to the point where a good third of my body would be over empty air, and she helpfully explains that they use airbending to keep themselves against the cliff as they go. That’s fine for me and Yun, and maybe even Rei could use the momentum from firebending for a short while, but after that she’d be in the same precariously balanced boat as Nanuq. All the temples were built by Avatars, I’m sure my past lives won’t mind if I do a little remodeling.

“This temple is thousands of years old,” Rei says as I start carving out a hollow in the cliff face.

“I’m not bending the temple, I’m bending the cliff. And _all_ stone is thousands of years old, along with all the air and all the water in the world. It’s fire that’s a flash in the pan.”

I can feel her gaze on my back while I push the rock deeper into the mountain, making it denser and stronger. “You need more sleep.”

So I’m a little grumpy. It’s not like banishing spirits is a fun way to punctuate the night. “If anyone else would like to jump into this conversation, feel free.”

“We still don’t have a plan for dealing with this dragon, do we?” Nanuq asks.

Yun takes the lead along the path, well within the fresh hollow but still gusting air into the emptiness to her left to be absolutely sure. “It seems like such a shame to kill it.”

“Destroying its nest may make it easier to drive off,” Rei says. She unwisely takes one dizzying look down over the edge and grabs at Nanuq’s sleeve. “Ugh, fine, make more space…it may not be possible to uproot it, though. It has no competition here, fair weather, not to mention a great deal of large, slow prey. For all their freedom through flight, dragons are quick to put down roots.”

“I’ll ask it nicely,” I say. “Once.”

It’s slow going as usual, but at least we’re not one fickle breeze away from death. The path starts sloping upward after a while, and the sun is up by the time we start seeing some stiff, chilled grass in the stone steps. “So what was that last night, Rei? That convergence event? Those were spirits?” I ask.

“They were…extrusions of spirits into our world, yes. Distorted by the journey, reduced to their baser substances. As thin as the veil was last night thanks to our presence, the solstice and the temple itself, they were weak, and affected easily by their native yin elements. And Kyoshi—”

“I know, Rei. Nothing should’ve come through at all, but I fucked up and gave that snake spirit mortality in a fit of bad judgement. Can you spare me the lecture until after we’ve taken care of this dragon?” I ask, and look back at her. She’s keeping her gaze fixed firmly on Nanuq’s shoulder as a constant point of reference, but she nods to acknowledge me all the same. “All right, I need a break. Forcing stone into stone is harder than it looks.”

None of them want to try their hand at earthbending, so we sit in the hollow, where we have a distant view of the southern half of the island and the sea beyond. Yun cuddles in beside me, while Rei still has Nanuq’s shoulder in a death grip. I reach over and nudge him. “What’re the Southern Water Tribes like?”

“Cold,” he says before taking a short pull from his water skin and offering it around. “And you’d expect it to be wet, but really it’s very dry most of the time. All the moisture’s locked up in snow or ice. Why do you ask?”

“Just curious. I’ve been everywhere else now, seen more of the world than I ever thought I would. But no Water Tribes yet.”

“All right, let’s see…the main approach is right through the southern archipelago, just east of Yenyua Island. There’s a big natural harbor there where they say a hydra knocked out an ice shelf for us to use, right to the west of that’s Shuinan territory. Everything around the big ice palace is theirs. But everyone uses the harbor for fishing and shipping. Tayagun territory is a little farther inland, near a glacier. Gives us a nice shadow when you’ve got the sun shining nonstop for almost half a year.”

“Do you get all your nighttime out of the way at once, too?” Yun asks.

“Yep, except around the equinoxes. But it’s six months where we can grow food in our glasshouses without interruption, and we always need the crop for the night months. That was one of the most disorienting things when Tiaraq and I first set out, going back and forth between day and night over and over. Apart from that, I guess it’s mostly like any other village you’d find anywhere, except we’ve got heavier coats and more structures made of ice, since it never melts.”

“Ice that never melts, I shudder to think,” Rei says with a shiver.

“You get used to it. And in the night months, if it’s really clear, you can see the aurora in the sky. Won’t find that in Hitenno, Rei.”

“I think I could suffer the loss,” she says dryly. “Stark beauty or not, you seem to spend a great deal of time fending off the cold your people chose to live in.”

He’s about to counter, but they can go on all day like this if I don’t step in. “Hey, no cultural posturing before noon or I’ll separate the two of you. Come on, we’ve got to get moving anyway. Dawn won’t last much longer, and then the dragon will be up and about.”

My arms are still sore, but it’s a small price to pay to keep them from bickering. The path gets a little steeper after a while, and eventually when I push away another chunk of earth, I see sky above us. Finally. And now the temple has a better walkway, everyone wins. Nearby, the wilted and frosted leaves of kava plants are arranged in neat little rows, but we can pick those up later. Rei sniffs at the air in between gusts of wind. “Too cold to rain, but the air still smells wet.”

“That probably means snow,” Nanuq says. Rei might know what it is, but she’s been in the Fire Nation lowlands her whole life, she’s probably never actually experienced it. Hopefully we can get back to the temple before that.

“Wonderful. Shall we track the dragon, then?”

“Track it?” I ask. “We can’t just…look around for it? That thing was bigger than Bima, I don’t even know how tracking would work.”

Rei stretches her arms out to indicate the enormity of the mountaintop. “And where would you like to _look around_ for it?”

“You know, you’re not so cheery in the mornings, either. Fine, how do we track this thing?”

“The scroll indicated a few telltale signs,” Rei says, tugging the sleeves of her robe farther down to guard her hands against the cold. “Yun, if you could check for any shorn treetops, that could give us an idea of what direction it takes off in. Kyoshi, look for any scoured stones, they like to sharpen their claws against large rocks. Nanuq, if there are any streams or lakes to be found up here, look for marks or prints on the banks. It can snatch bison and keep going, but it has to stop for water. I can see if I can track its spirit.”

She nudges at a patch of grass with her boot, then sits down and starts to meditate. Curious how she gets the one job that doesn’t involve traipsing around. Yun pulls in the air around her and takes off toward a small thicket of evergreens, disappearing near the top of the tree line. Nanuq falls into a waterbending stance, reaching out for any of his native element, and walks off without a word. I can’t really do the same, so I pick another direction, jamming my heel into the ground every so often to see if I can feel a big dragon-shaped lump anywhere.

The mountaintop is huge and surprisingly flat, I thought it would terminate in a few sharp peaks. Perhaps the temple was meant to be built up here when someone saw the space under the cliff and decided to get creative.

Well, Rei had the right of it. An outcropping of stone near the edge is marked by deep, crisscrossed gouges as thick as three of my fingers. Not something I want to be on the receiving end of. There’s a great big patch of browner grass nearby, too. And the bones, of course.

A pile of what I assume are flying bison skeletons lies at the edge of the cliff, only slightly smaller than the rocks. Some are burned black, some are snapped cleanly in two, and more than a few skulls certainly aren’t adult-sized. Dragons have to eat, sure. But that doesn’t make it easier to look at.

“Kyoshi?”

Damn. Yun’s voice is far-off, shouted from the treetops nearby. She comes soaring out of the thicket—whenever we have enough open space, she reminds me of why she deserves her arrows—arcs through the air, and lands with a wide gust of billowing wind. “I thought that was you going this way, did you find any…thing…”

The pile of bones is too wide for me to stand in front of and spare her the view. I try to put a hand on her shoulder, but she pushes past me and falls to her knees at the mess of bones and scorch. “Yun?”

She just shakes her head and brushes some cinders off one of the smaller skulls with her hand. A few tears are threatening at the corners of her eyes. “All right.”

I don’t want to leave her alone, the dragon obviously likes this spot, but she’s not going to move and come with me to get the others. We’ve never really had to deal with anything like this. Bison sometimes died at the Southern Air Temple, but they weren’t front and center, so clearly picked over. Vultures don’t leave skeletons like this. I go and sit next to her, shoulder tilted for easy leaning on. “I didn’t think it would be so…so much,” she says dully. “And the calves? That’s evil, it’s not right.”

“It’s an animal, we can’t paint its actions like that—”

“Those were _babies_!”

Her face screws up and she dabs at the corner of her eyes with the cuff of her sleeve. Oh, Yun…I put a hand on her far shoulder and pull her closer. There’s no resistance in her, and she slumps into my side, hands balled up into fists on her thighs. “I know they were, Yun. The dragon’s not going to eat any more bison, all right? I won’t let it.”

She hums in acknowledgement and starts spinning the beads on her pendant. Eventually I can feel two sets of footsteps through the ground, and then Rei and Nanuq are beside us, grimacing at the bones. “You wanted claw marks?” I ask, and wave toward the rocks.

“Indeed.” Rei walks around the space, dragging her fingers along some of the matted grass in the middle of the mountaintop. Nanuq kneels down on Yun’s other side to hug her, which she gratefully accepts with a fresh string of tears. “This is the nest…so where is the dragon?”

And then, as if on cue, the heavy beat of wings breaks the unsteady quiet. A long, high screech shakes every bone in my body, and Rei pushes us all down. Coming out of the east, half-silhouetted by the rising sun, is a very large and very angry red dragon. The ones at the Kasai palace were tiny, little more than drakes. Without the benefit of a bison underneath us to match its speed, it’s easy to see how fast it can approach, screaming out of the sky with fire growing in its mouth.

Rei moves her hands in a long, wide circle, sparking white flames in her palms that burst out to meet the onslaught. It’s hot enough that everything feels ready to flash into cinders, my clothes, my hair, the grass underneath us. For those few seconds it feels like I’ve fallen into a forge, with blinding white light surrounding us and cooler orange patches trying to break through.

It stops, finally. Rei’s firebending sputters out, along with the rest of her, and she sinks to the ground with a few vain grasps at the charred earth around us. Yun grabs her under the arms and starts hauling her off toward the trees. A fire risk, to be sure, but if it’s survived this long it might keep standing for a while. “You fill up your water skins?” I ask right before the dragon passes over us, flicking its tail in annoyance that we haven’t been roasted already. It’s huge, it’ll need a moment to turn and circle back around. But only a moment. Nanuq nods, and I pull out the stopper on mine. “We have to clip its wings, if it comes in like that again we’ll be ashes.”

“Any ideas?”

The dragon curls and coils in midair, twisting to reorient itself, and I pull up a thick wall to put _something_ in its way. No telling how long it’ll last against dragon fire, but I can’t beat back flames like Rei can. I hold the earth as stiff as I can and shrug.

“Not dying would be a start.”

That had better not be the last thing I say. All the water swirls out of Nanuq’s water skins and mine right before another withering wave of heat starts rolling over us. I can actually see steam rising up from the water as he tries to coalesce it all into half a dozen spikes the size of my hand. The heat is dizzying, the light from the fire almost blinding even after ripping up a few more chunks of earth on our sides to provide extra cover. Part of my shoulder is touching the stone in front of us, and it burns right through my clothes and down to my skin.

“Wait, wait—now!”

The fire around us begins to fade and the tip of a shadow passes over us as Nanuq sends the ice spikes hurtling upward. Most of them bounce harmlessly off the dragon’s underbelly, but one catches on its right wing and cuts a small shear close to the back. Another screech leaves our ears ringing as the rest of the dragon’s long, serpentine body passes over us. How can we fight something this big by whittling it down?

Yun comes running out of the tree line without Rei in tow, dousing patches of flames on the grass with some airbending and the occasional stamp of her boots. Not much time to think up a plan, that monster’s already circling back. It’s a tiny bit slower, though, and falters through the turn. “Both of you get into the trees,” I say, and push the earthen walls back into the ground.

They look at me like I’ve grown another eye. “We can’t leave you out here,” Yun says.

“I’ve got a plan, all right? I just…I need you both out of the way. Please.”

Calling them unhappy about this would be a serious understatement. Yun grabs Nanuq around the waist and sends a blast of air into the ground, propelling them both back toward the little forest. Now I have some space to work.

For all its strength, the dragon is awfully predictable, and comes back in exactly the same way, roaring and spewing fire from the sides of its mouth. Good. Preying on bison probably doesn’t require a whole lot of ingenuity. My fingers are clenching so hard that my hands start to ache as I reach into the ground and start fashioning the shape I need. Its eyes are as big as my head, boring into me with ruthless primality as it wavers from its injured wing.

The ground shoots up an angry peak on command, a huge sharp jut high enough to hit the dragon. With only one good wing, it can’t turn or tilt fast enough to avoid it, and I can feel the jagged end of the rock straining under the pressure to break away as the dragon crashes into it. A few bursts of fire land around me as the stone tears into the roaring dragon’s underbelly, propelled by its own momentum further and further along its fatal path. The thing’s shadow engulfs me, and then an instant later I’m getting drenched in its blood.

I pull up some more stone around me to protect against the rest, but it’s too little, too late. Every inch of clothing and exposed skin is covered in thick, searingly hot dragon blood, and it’s a fight to get it all off as my skin starts to burn. The pain takes a moment to hit, but when it hits…my hands get the worst of it, sweeping and batting it off the rest of my body, and in the flashes of clarity between the pain I can see that the palms and fingers of my gloves are just gone, replaced by blistering, reddened skin. My upper back starts to burn from the blood clinging to my hair, and in a half-blind fit I pull off a bit of my stone cover and slice away as much hair as I can. Everything trembles as the dragon crashes into the other side of the mountaintop, screeching and roaring and uselessly clawing at the ground with its talons.

Wait, it’s blood.

Waterbending works fine on the remaining bits coating the looser parts of my kimono, though it’s ragged and frayed by the time I get the last of it off, and my skin is damaged anyway. My hands mostly, but I can feel the raw nerves welling under blisters on parts of my neck and face, too. A pathetic little whimper creaks out of my throat as I slump against some of the stone and try to keep from touching anything with my hands.

Yun and Nanuq are carrying a still-dazed Rei back out, but leave her to stumble on her own as they rush over to me to try and help. I must look a mess, and the damage is done anyway. Most of my hair is lying on the ground in a thick reddish mat, my kimono is shredded at best—I _like_ this kimono—and a third of my skin is still burning with pain. A good deal of my face feels like one big scar, too.

“Needed you out of the way,” I mumble, and quickly realize that it hurts to talk. The scalds on my neck don’t like being moved around by speech very much, it seems.

Nanuq pulls in the discarded ice spikes, melts them, and starts working on my hands. The coolness feels good, but I know my whole body is going to take a while. Yun goes back over to Rei and helps her along when she sees I’m still alive. “That was so stupid,” Nanuq says in a shaky voice as he directs the water over my burns. He seems stuck somewhere between a seething half-whisper and a steely attempt to not break down on me. “You could’ve—that could’ve _killed_ you! You can’t put yourself in danger like that!”

If my throat’s on the verge of getting damaged, I don’t want to risk saying anything, and I only nod. Rei hobbles over with her arm slung across Yun’s shoulders, and she takes an appraising look at the enormous streak of blood still sizzling on the ground. Her voice is a little weaker and raspier than usual. “Clever.”

For all the good it did me.

There isn’t much to do but sit there and let Nanuq worry over me as he works. He hesitates on nudging down the front of my kimono to get at the rest of the burns, so I very carefully strip out of my clothes and let him keep working. When my hands are usable again, if very sore, I pick up my shorn hair and bend the blood out of it. That was one part of me that always felt…feminine, I suppose, and now my hair can’t be much longer than Yun’s. I let the wind carry it off, strand by broken strand.

Once Nanuq moves on from my throat, I try a few careful noises to see if my throat is damaged. A little scratchy, but no worse than a bad sore throat. “How’d you do that, Rei?” I ask. She looks over at me, but for once I can’t be bothered to care that she’s getting an eyeful. I’m scorched almost as well as her in some spots.

“By seriously overtaxing myself,” she says, still leaning on Yun’s shoulder. The hems of her robes are in tatters, some spots from being on the ground and others from burns. “You and I can disperse fire, dispel it, but we can only take so much chi into our bodies at once. You might have been able to handle it, had I taught you the technique. For me it was like…filling a water skin to bursting and then forcing in even more. Dragons are far too powerful to fight on their terms.”

“Clearly.”

Nearly half of the pain on my body is cursory and easily swept away with healing water, though the soreness is going to remain for a while. The scars on my hand are going to stick around too, and I have no way of telling how my face and neck look now. My kimono is a total loss, barely holding together as I pull it back on. I’ll have to find a tailor in Caoyan or at the temple. And new gloves.

“All right, try walking around a bit,” Nanuq says, and helps me to my feet. Well, I’m a little stiff from sitting for so long, but other than that nothing starts screaming in pain. I try a few simple movements, earthbending and airbending—I think I can hold off on trying any firebending for the moment—and that seems to work fine, too. I want to lean down and give him a little peck on the cheek for all the time he spent fixing me up, but I’m sure I don’t look so good right now.

“Thank you.” I run the back of one hand over what’s left of my hair to get a sense of the length. Not much on the back, a little more on the front and sides. I’ll have to get it evened out. “Let’s go make sure it’s dead and get the kava.”

We follow the long trail of cooling blood along the mountaintop, back the way we came, toward the path down to the temple. Eventually the blood gives over to a freshly cleaved ditch where the dragon began to crash, and at the far end is the beast itself, twisted and broken with some of its innards halfway out of its gut. One of its claws is…twitching? “Is it really still alive after that?” I ask.

Rei hurries ahead of us, to the dragon’s head where we can hear its desperate attempts to try and keep breathing. Its tail flicks helplessly at us as we approach, but it does nothing to lash out at Rei as she kneels down by its snout and rests one hand between its eyes. Yun scoffs when she starts saying something in what sounds like an old, formal version of Hitennese, rhythmic and muted like a prayer.

It starts seizing, writhing on the ground through its death throes, and Rei throws her arms around its head, trying to hold it still as the life runs out of it. One last pair of twitches rock through its massive body, and then a small flame rolls from its mouth as it falls still. Rei catches it in her hands and cradles the little orange flame like a piece of fragile jade before it sinks into her skin, as much to her confusion as ours. “What is that?” Yun asks.

Rei doesn’t seem inclined to answer, and instead she grips at her hand as fire starts to swirl around it. The flame grows and starts ringing her whole body, quickly becoming too fast for any of us to track, and she looks at us before she starts to shiver. I try to bend the fire around her, but I can’t wrest control of it. My bending seems fine, but whatever that is, it isn’t fire.

She gasps, but the sound quickly turns to a steady stream of flame, pluming up over her head in a succession of colors as she kneels there, held up as if she were on a string. The fire starts out orange like mine, then slips into blue and her usual white, but then it collapses down to countless narrow, spindling bands, crackling with barely-contained energy up through the air.

Like a stroke of lightning.

It disappears as quickly as it came on and Rei falls to all fours, breathing heavily through her rasp. I’d think she’d just ran the length of the island, she sounds so exhausted. The end of her braid dangles loosely over her shoulder as her breath stills to its usual scratchiness.

“Rei? Are you all right?”

Nanuq’s voice is small, concerned. She gets back to her feet, and a few sparks crackle around her hands. Her eyes are brighter than I remember, almost impossibly golden as they sweep over us.

“Wonderful,” she says, and smiles.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Avatar Kyoshi, art by [AATKAW](aatkaw.tumblr.com)


	35. Scars and Burns

It finally started snowing when we got back to the temple, but by that point the weather was well in the back of our thoughts.

With access to more water, Nanuq thinks he can do a more thorough job healing me, and he and Yun and I have taken one end of the sickroom while a few of the nuns skilled in healing and spiritual matters examine Rei. She’s sitting there, stripped to the waist—despite being told it wasn’t necessary to take off any of her clothes—and sitting calmly as they look her over and swirl incense around her body.

None of which would warrant mention, except for the fact that she hasn’t stopped smiling.

I’m very used to seeing emotions in the abstract, Yun and Nanuq have plenty of them, but with Rei, it’s…unnerving. One little half-grin is enough to let us know that her day’s been brightened immeasurably. This looks more like a rictus. She isn’t giggling or twitching or doing anything else that would tell us she’s lost her mind, only looking around the room and smiling, listening intently as the abbess questions her.

“Can you tell me your name?” Fai asks while one of her nuns strikes a singing bowl and the tone carries through the room.

“Takarabe Rei.”

She looks over to us for confirmation, and Yun nods. “That’s right. Your homeland?”

“Hitenno, the port of Shinden, on Baihe Island.”

Another nod from us. “Age?” Fai asks.

“Twenty, twenty-one in the summer.”

“Very good. And do you remember what happened this morning?”

The smile falters a bit for the first time, and Rei tilts her head as she recalls it. “We took up on the path from the temple, Kyoshi carved out part of the cliff, and Nanuq needled me about not being able to see the aurora in Hitenno.”

“ _That_ she remembers,” he mutters.

“Once we were on the mountaintop, we looked for the dragon nest, but the dragon found us first. I dispelled the fire, took in most of it, and then—” She slips back to her usual neutral expression, and then a frown as she pinches the bridge of her nose— “Please forgive me, the rest is hazy. Kyoshi mortally wounded the dragon, I tried to comfort her as she passed, and her spirit slipped to me rather than moving on. Then we collected the kava and came back here.”

Fai pats her on the shoulder and comes over to us, where Nanuq is working on my upper back. “I can’t see much of anything _physically_ wrong with her,” she says in a quieter tone as she tucks her hands into her sleeves. “Apart from the grinning. I see what you mean now, Avatar Kyoshi. It’s a bit off-putting. She let a dragon spirit bond to her? And she really bent…lightning?”

“That’s the only way to describe it,” Yun says. She’s been trying very hard all afternoon not to look out at the bison in the sky, eager to make up for the lost time in their mating season. “She can bend white fire, there’s no way to get stronger than that except with lightning.”

“I see.” She looks politely away as I sit up and pull on my tattered kimono. All they had at the temple was a bunch of robes for nuns, and none of those were nearly big enough for me, so I could only get the name of a tailor back in Caoyan. “There was an old Fire Nation belief that the red dragons controlled the world’s lightning and the blue dragons its thunder, but I always thought it was only a story. To know that your friend can tap into a lost skill like that is incredible, though not without certain considerations.”

“Considerations?” I ask. “What would those be?”

We look over at Rei, who’s started to absently braid and unbraid her hair while the nuns continue their examination. “Have you ever seen the aftermath of a lightning strike? I hope for all your sakes that her self-control is excellent. And given the sudden change you noted in her demeanor, combined with the fact that she took a dragon’s spirit into herself, that may not be your friend anymore. Ah, not entirely,” she’s quick to add. “It isn’t as if she’s been possessed, she seems fully in control of her memories and faculties. But that dragon did _something_ to her.”

Too right. “All the attention is flattering, really,” Rei says from across the room, “but will this be much longer?”

Even her voice is different under all that rasp, lighter, less distant. The nuns shrug, first to each other and then to Fai, and the abbess dismisses them. Rei pulls on the top of her outfit as they shuffle out and hops up, aided by little bursts of white flame from her palms. “I think I should try this new technique,” she says, and slips out to the courtyard.

“I’ll talk to her. Spirits are supposed to be my job,” I say as I pull myself up. “Even weird dragon spirits that lodge themselves in my friends. Nanuq, can you work with the kava we got?”

“They should be fine to use once I boil them and cut up the roots.”

“And I’ll try to keep Bima from joining the mess out there,” Yun says in a terribly resigned voice.

“Hold on. Could we have a moment, abbess?”

Fai bows and drifts out of the room. “All right, be honest with me,” I whisper, dreading that very same honesty. “My neck, my face, my back…how bad?”

Concern washes over their faces, but I don’t need lovers to soothe me right now. I need someone to tell me how badly I’ve been burned since there’s not a single looking-glass in this entire temple. “Tell me, please. I can’t see how it looks for myself.”

“It’s going to scar,” Nanuq finally says, and gently, very gently, traces two lines from right below my right eye, one toward my chin and one down the middle of my cheek. “Two streaks.”

The skin he skirts over is fresh and raw, barely healed and still flaking a bit. He moves his hand to the other side of my face. “And there’s a patch right above your jawline here.”

I can’t look at them, I can’t. My hands are the only other thing I can focus on, and they have plenty of their own new scars, front and back, webs of harsh pink lines from my wrists to the tips of nine fingers. Yun tries to put a hand on my arm, but I back away. “The rest?”

“There’s one big splotch between your shoulder blades, and this line on your throat.” He sounds like he’s struggling each time he lists something else. Not exactly the cute girl he happened upon in the middle of nowhere.

“Thank you. For that. For the healing. I’ll go see if I can get anything out of Rei.”

“Kyoshi, I—is there anything we can do?” Yun asks as she spins the beads on her pendant.

I force a smile and shake my head. “Get some rest, it’s been a hell of a day.”

Focusing on finding Rei is a decent enough distraction. I don’t want to think about the quick flashes of grimaces I saw, or the worried way Nanuq bit his lip when he must have realized the burns weren’t fading. The rest of my body’s always been a mess, the scars and the lankiness and the odd map of muscle from overdeveloping my earthbending for years, but I could always keep that under my clothes, away from prying eyes that were already determined to see me as some kind of freak. But I always tried so hard not to let my face get marked. I could at least preserve one small bit of my body that wasn’t a mess and now that’s gone too, literally burned away, and I hardly have Rei’s natural beauty to fall back on.

I must look a sight, I think as I wipe my eyes dry on my sleeve. A real sight. I’m going to need a lot more face paint, but that isn’t going to help at night. Maybe I should get it over with quickly and have everyone go back to sleeping by themselves. I can worry about that later.

Rei’s in one of the interior courtyards, and once I nudge my way through the wall of fascinated nuns I can see her. She’s down to her pants and undershirt despite the chill in the air, running her firebending forms with jagged, crackling lightning trailing behind her hands. What’s left of my hair starts to stand on end—another lovely botched part of my body, despite one of the nuns doing her very best to salvage it and even out my frantic cutting—as she gets closer and the air charges and hums. It’s a beautiful, starkly lit display, full of raw power that demands attention.

She brings one leg straight up in a long, powerful kick, and the lightning following her boot claps through the air left in its wake. Rei’s grin is still far too wide as she finishes her routine and bows to some polite applause and matches more than a few lingering, hungry looks from some of the nuns impressed by her…agility. Fai must not care like Yun’s mother does about the preferences of her charges. Even with snow falling out in the valley, Rei’s sweating heavily when she puts her robe back on and I go up to her.

“You’re getting the hang of that real quick,” I say as she tugs her braid up through her clothes.

“Indeed. Perhaps when I understand the process more I can teach you this…lightningbending.”

“Come on, let’s go somewhere they’re not undressing you with their eyes, I’ve got to talk to you.”

The nuns seem a little put out, but Rei follows me to the dormitories, humming quietly to herself as we go through the maze of corridors and back to my room. She goes in ahead of me and runs her hand over the inkstone on the desk as I push the door shut. Should I bar it? Is this going to turn violent? I let it be and we sit down by the bed.

“I’ll get right to it,” I say, picking at one of the fresh tears on my sleeve. “Are you still Rei? Or are you that red dragon I killed?”

She stares at me for a long moment, her amber eyes so rich and full they seem to be giving off their own light, and then shakes her head with a little smile. “No, Kyoshi. I let her spirit bond with mine when it left her body, but I am still the woman you found in Shinden and went off with to Kasai. I am still Rei, my mind is intact. I remember you coming to my temple, your difficulties with the fire chakra, everything. But now I have a bit…more to me. Like you and the Avatar spirit.”

Well, that takes a bit of the exclusivity out of it. “Then why all the grinning? Rei doesn’t do that,” I say. “Rei’s eerily calm and collected, she doesn’t smile more than Yun.”

“Why? Because everything is so much _more_ now,” she explains, and throws her arms out at her sides with a few small sparks flying between her fingers. “My whole life felt like the haze people describe in dreams until now. The color of your kimono is brighter, the sound of your boot scraping on the floor is closer, the cold whips of wind outside brush deeper on my face. Everything I experienced was as if it was filtered through smoked glass, and now the glass is gone. Why should I not smile?”

“Because the weather turns foul whenever you get too excited? Because you told me it attracts spirits when you get angry or sad or happy? We ought to be in the middle of a monsoon with how emotional you’re acting now.”

Her smile falters a bit, and she touches at her fire chakra, her _manipura_ , where I suppose the dragon’s taken up residence. “Yes, circumstances made me a bridge between the worlds, like you. But the dragon was an earthly spirit, one that gave up her connection with the other world to take form here on the earth. When we bonded, I think she…burned out the last connection, overpowered it. If her spirit casts a larger shadow than mine, perhaps I can no longer be a bridge and attract other spirits like a signal fire. It would explain why everything is suddenly more vibrant, if I no longer have one foot in our world and the other in theirs.”

I haven’t the faintest idea what to make of any of that, but there’s some rudimentary kind of sense to it. Rei’s situation, being a bridge without being the Avatar, is unique as far as I know, and this business with dragon spirits isn’t something I came across in any library, either. She’s probably trying to figure it out as much as I am.

“You still seem skeptical.”

“Vibrant Rei is going to take some getting used to,” I say, and she nods. “I think I’ll like her, but if she starts breathing fire at people I’ll have to step in.”

“I would expect nothing less.” She reaches over then, running her fingers along the burn streaks on the right side of my face. I’d say she had a terrible fever if I didn’t know better, her skin is near to scorching. My first instinct is to turn away, but if anyone might understand how I feel, it would be her. She says softly, “You get used to them, you know.”

“You don’t have any on your face.”

“A fair point. Do you think Yun and Nanuq will be any less attracted to you for it?”

Right to the heart of the matter, as much Rei as she’s ever been. “Maybe,” I admit in a whisper as I take her hand and move it away from my face. “My hair will grow out again, eventually. I know they don’t mind all the scars, and I can wear my face paint during the day. But at night, in bed? I don’t…I don’t know.”

Rei nods again, pulls her sleeve up to expose the burn scar on her arm, and puts my hand on the fragile skin. She’s burning up. “You know the extent of all these. And no, there are none on my face, and some people may find them unseemly. But to a certain kind of person, someone like Yun or Nanuq, I think it might simply add to your dignity. You _are_ the most powerful person in the world, the scars and burns are a testament to your resilience.”

“Well, I am resilient,” I say, and put a loose lock of hair behind her ear. She doesn’t demur, which is new. Maybe vibrant Rei won’t be so strange. She leans over and wraps me in a slow, careful embrace. _That’s_ a bit strange. “You can’t be Rei, she doesn’t do hugs.”

“Droll as ever,” she says into my kimono. “Go play with your kava, you more than earned it.”

“What’re you going to do for the rest of the day?”

Her grin turns wry, conspiratorial. “A private encore for a few of those nuns, perhaps…?”

And to think she was the one making comments about _us_ desecrating temples. Rei heads down the opposite end of the corridor when we leave with an unusual spring in her step. I hope that dragon’s good for her. It doesn’t take long to find Nanuq, he’s claimed a corner of the kitchen to carve up the kava roots with a small whalebone knife. There’s a good pile there, more than enough for us to get into the spirit world twice. I was sorely tempted to hang back in my room and put on my face paint, but Rei occasionally dispenses a bit of sagely advice. Nanuq’s either going to stay attracted to me or he’s not, paint or no paint.

“This looks like enough to send the whole temple on a trip,” I say as I come up behind him. He almost jumps up off his cushion and fumbles with the knife, but he recovers. “Is all that ready?”

“Might have a slightly strange taste because of the different soil, but it should still be fine. The root itself is hardy, it can sit in the ground for months and not lose any potency. Do you still want to do this, though? You didn’t have such a great time with it at Shudan.”

“I think I can handle it. Besides, I’ve got to learn Shuishei somehow. Should we do this back in our room, or…?”

“Sure, let’s go.”

He bundles up a few roots in a bag and walks with me back to the dormitories, free hand slipping around my waist as we go. Yun must still be outside, keeping Bima away from the orgy. Ugh, that isn’t a mental image I need to have. “Nanuq?”

“Hmm?”

Sure, I can fight dragons without a second thought, but this turns my stomach into a mess. “I need to ask you something, and I won’t be mad no matter what you say, but I need you to be honest with me.”

“Have I ever not been?” he asks as we stop outside the door to our room.

“No, you haven’t. Or maybe you have, I don’t know.”

Deep breath, woman. “I—I need to know if you’re still interested in continuing what we have, knowing that this isn’t going away,” I say, and touch the juncture of the two burn streaks under my right eye. “If not, I understand. But I have to know.”

He looks up at me and takes my hand. “Kyoshi, you’re not any less beautiful than you were when we left the temple this morning,” he says as he rubs his thumb around the burn on my palm. “If these are hurting at all, if the skin isn’t healing, I’ll help you any way I can. But they couldn’t ever make you anything but amazing and gorgeous to me.”

“Such a flatterer.” The tightness around my heart finally starts to unclench a bit. His head pitches back as I lean down to kiss him, and he’s quick to press against me in response. “Come on, let’s give this body-swapping a try. Intentionally this time.”

We lay out a few more blankets on the bed and make sure everything’s comfortable as we sit down and face one another. Nanuq takes two of the roots from his bag and gives one to me. This part, admittedly, I wasn’t looking forward to. Somehow the soil here made it even more bitter than the southern variety, and soon I’m overcome with the stomach-churning feeling of falling. Maybe I _should_ learn to do this without aid…

And then we’re in the spirit world.

The part that corresponds with the temple is mercifully on the top of a mountain, rather than leaving us hanging in the empty air underneath a cliff. Nanuq shimmers into existence in front of me, and then I look down at my hands. No burns. They must not have incorporated into the way I see myself yet.

“It’s beautiful here,” he says, and I have to agree. Everything is cloaked in twilight while countless luminescent spirits float lazily in the sky above us. Falling stars race across the firmament, and even the flowers around where we’ve landed are bright and pink and have petals curled in what look like origami designs. But we’re not here for the view. “So we just switch places and head back now.”

When we get up, there are little golden lights where we appeared, and we sit back in them with an odd warming sensation. I close my eyes, take another breath, and drift back through the lacuna between the worlds.

It isn’t dissimilar from accidentally falling into Rei’s body, apart from the lack of a nasty shock as her old wounds take hold. Nanuq’s body is much more at ease, resting comfortably with a nice straight back and only the slightest bit of tension on the side of his head where the hair is pulled into its three little braids.

I see myself when I open his eyes.

The burns on my face are thicker than I thought, fading out gradually from the harshly darkened lines I could feel to my usual skin tone. My throat is largely the same, but I can’t focus on it once Nanuq opens my eyes and smiles back at me.

I can _feel_ his body reacting to mine, even without him inside it. His breathing changes until I force it under control, his heart beats a little more firmly, there’s a strangely pleasant buildup of pressure between his legs—oh. _Oh_. Well, I guess it was silly of me to worry about him not being attracted to me anymore. His thoughts are in his native Shuishei, and even though I shouldn’t understand them, I do on some level. _Kyoshi. Raavashon. Good, warm, safe. Kashandaranakhal. Tall beautiful lady._

“How’s it feel?” he asks.

“Like I’d be off-balance all the time. How do you walk around with these things?” His voice is deeper than mine, and his throat almost tickles with the unfamiliarity of it.

“I meant the language,” he says in my voice, but in his language. His little gestures and tics are still there, still recognizable, but seeing them transposed on my face and body is beyond strange.

“I can hear the Shuishei, but now it feels like it’s more than a bunch of harsh sounds. Here, try saying something else, I’ll see if I understand it.”

“All right, let’s see. There was the time we abducted the Fire Lord and took her for a stroll through her own city. We got attacked and we were saved by her kunoichi half-sister. Oh, and then she propositioned me once I was done getting that awful black lotus out of her body. _That_ was an international incident waiting to happen. And before that, Tiaraq and I wrecked our boat out in the middle of nowhere, only to be saved by the Avatar.”

On a conscious level, everything he says through me sounds like nonsense, but after a moment I can grasp at the meaning of the sounds. I can’t believe it’s working so well. I don’t know how much of it I’ll retain once I’m back in my own body, but I thought the differences between Chikyan and Shuishei would be much harder to bridge than Chikyan and Hitennese. “How was that?” he asks.

“Surprisingly understandable. A little hard to focus, though. I didn’t realize how much your thoughts went into _kiss her kiss her kiss her_ , but there it goes.”

He smiles sheepishly and shrugs. “It’s an easy trap to fall into. This is already more time than you spent with Rei and you picked up Hitennese fast, should we go back?”

“One thing first,” I say, and lean over to kiss him. One of the burn streaks goes over the right side of my lips, I want to know how it feels. Not that I have any reference for how my lips felt to someone else before, but at least there’s nothing off-putting about the texture. His heart is hammering out of his chest, to say nothing of the quick, sweet twinges along the length of his cock. Both our faces are red when I ease back, and his chest keeps pounding for a moment. “Is this what it always feels like when you kiss me? Even with the scars and burns and chopped-up hair?”

He nods my head. “I told you, I don’t care about any of that. I just…love you,” he blurts out, and puts a hand over my mouth.

It’s a little strange to hear it in my own voice, but it still send a warmth blooming through his body. “I love you, too.”

I grab the rest of the kava, hand him half, and brace myself for the return trip.

That was a fun little detour, but it’s good to be back in my own body. Nanuq’s felt a little cramped. He rolls his neck once he opens his eyes and yelps when I jump on him. He lands on his back, then puts his hands on my waist as I bite and suck at his lower lip. “Whoa, what’s gotten into you?” he asks when I let go, but I’m a little too preoccupied rolling my hips against his to answer. Well, that didn’t fade any. “I—I thought you didn’t have the best experience with men?”

“I just had a very good experience with one,” I whisper against his ear. “Do you want to…?”

He’s going to hurt his neck, nodding so fast like that. I sit him back up and push his tunic off his shoulders so I can trace my fingers along the little lines that make up his tattoos, following and tugging away his sleeves until I’ve stripped him to the waist, and now I can work on his pants. He stops me in my tracks, though, by pulling my sash loose and pushing my kimono open, putting all the scars on display. I freeze up for a moment, still desperate for proof of what he said, and he leans in to kiss along all the old marks and fresh burns. One of his hands wraps around my waist and nudges me until I’m the one on my back, letting him roam with his lips as I push at his waistband with my feet.

“Thought you liked to take charge with this,” he says as he rests one hand on the inside of my thigh, circling some of the sensitive skin with his thumb.

“I’m the Avatar, I’m entitled to a few exceptions.”

We need a few moments of decidedly mundane shuffling about to get the rest of our clothes off, and then I pull him down on top of me, wrapping my legs around him and pushing a hand through his loose hair. “You’ve never done this, have you?”

Nanuq shakes his head, looking a little sheepish as he rests against my torso with his elbows to prop him up, and I reach down slowly. The steady twitch of his shaft against my belly turns into a needful thrum in my hand as I guide him down, easing him into place where he can prod with some hesitation and send a jolt of pleasure up through me. My instinct is to push him away and run, to get as far away as possible from the slightly bitter smell of his arousal, but I keep telling myself that he won’t hurt me. He loves me. “Just relax…”

There’s a short flash of pain as he pushes into me, and I have to stretch a little to accommodate him, but it’s quickly replaced by a wonderful flood of warmth and fullness when his hips hit home against mine. I plant a hand on the back of his neck and pull him down for another kiss when he starts to pull back, leaving a sore absence he’s all too happy to fill again and again.

Eventually he stops holding himself up and snakes his hands under my back, pulling us as close as he possibly can until I can feel the sharp rise and fall of his chest with each long thrust. His hands seem to seek out the burn between my shoulder blades, pressing softly on the marked skin as if to say he doesn’t care about it. “Very good,” I whisper, rolling my hips in counter with his to get a better angle on his instroke. “You feel so g— _ahh_ …”

All the other encouragement gets lost in a haze of happy pleasure when he hits upon a wonderful little spot, and my nails rake across his firm back while I shiver underneath him. His legs push against mine in the rhythm we’ve fallen into, a slow rising action where I spur him on, drawing out every desperate sound I can to let me know he’s enjoying this as much as me. He kisses me first the next time, biting hard at my lip before his tongue flits against it, and I let him in as his thrusts get more frantic, as his hips crash harder into mine. Finally there’s no outstroke, only hungry push after hungry push against me while his whole body trembles against mine, and then a short, heady flood of warmth deep inside me. He lets out an unsteady breath and kisses into the crook of my neck, shaking every so often as the aftershocks work through him.

We stay like that for a time, kissing and squeezing and laughing, if only because orgasms have a habit of bringing on giggles, before we remember that Yun’s going to come back eventually. There’s a sharp, sudden ache as he slips out of me and bends away any risk of pregnancy, and we rush to put some nightclothes on so we can fall back onto the bed, curled up against the cold. Eventually I hear Yun’s overly conspicuous footsteps coming down the hall, and she comes in with the look of a woman who’s seen enough amatory flying bison to last a lifetime. The room has to smell like sex, but she doesn’t make any comment about it as she greets us and changes for bed.

“How’d the language lesson go?” she asks as she crawls up onto my unoccupied side. “Are you ready to turn down all those Shuibei marriage proposals?”

“I’m sure I’ll need more actual lessons, but hearing my own thoughts in another language made it easier to understand. What about Bima? Did you scare off all her suitors?”

“Ah…I finally just fed her some ginseng root and let her go join the others,” she says in a resigned tone, “then I came back here. Oh, wait, did you make any progress with Rei?”

“No, can’t you tell? She’s still sleeping in her own room instead of in here with us.”

I get one sleepy laugh from Nanuq and one whack on the shoulder from Yun. “Really though, we talked, I think she’s going to be all right. We’ll need to get used to all that smiling, but she thinks the dragon spirit forced out her connection to the spirit world, so the weather won’t get foul every time she gets emotional.”

Yun hums as she takes in all the information, then decides that it’d be better processed with a clearer head. We all say our goodnights, and they both curl up against me. If all goes well and the weather breaks by morning, it shouldn’t take more than a week or two to get to the Northern Water Tribe.


	36. Social Contract

The weather is not kind to us as we try to go north.

Bima seems to have worked through whatever passes for horniness for bison and doesn’t have any problem flying in the light snow that persists once we leave Caoyan, but the storm only gets worse when we set our course northeast. Rei won’t wear anything more than her usual robes, claiming it’d make her too hot, but we wisely found coats for ourselves in town after I got my clothes repaired. I’m inclined to believe her, since any snow that lands on or around her in the saddle melts as soon as it touches down. The rest of us, though, are more comfortable bundled up. Nanuq doesn’t seem to mind much, and Yun has her breathing exercises, but I’m damn cold, even with everything wrapped around me.

“How good a brother is Tiaraq, really?” I ask. Nanuq raises an eyebrow. “I mean, I’m sure there are plenty of people down there in Chikyu who could use my help. And maybe have a roof. And a fire.”

“Well, my sisters weren’t always so great, so he wins by default,” Nanuq says. He pulls in all the snow that’s accumulated and melted in the saddle and bends it overboard, but it’s largely a futile effort, and flakes start landing again as soon as he lets go of his hold on the water. “And the sages in the northern tribe are one of the only groups you haven’t annoyed yet, do you really want to miss your opportunity to do that?”

That’s true, I’m very adept at provoking the ire of religious authorities. Bima groans loudly enough to make herself heard over the wind, and I look over the side of the saddle. After the initial nausea wears off, I can see that patches of her fur are starting to ice over. I can reach one with some light firebending through my glove, but there are plenty more. A frozen bison isn’t going to be a happy bison.

“We’ve been at this for nearly a week and we’re still skirting the northern Chikyan coast,” I say, and shift my way to the front of the saddle where I can lean down toward Yun. Complaining isn’t beneath me, I want something warm to drink. “Come on, we’re still in view of the province down there. And it’s a long fall if Bima freezes.”

“You were the one who wanted to tough out the storm,” Yun says through pursed, chapped lips. “If we touch down now, we might not get back into the air for a few days.”

Nanuq shrugs. I think it’s a shrug, I can hardly tell through his coat. “Northern Water Tribe’s not going anywhere. It might even get closer, if the weather freezes some of the polar waters.”

“Fine, fine. What’s that down there, Liandu Province?” Yun asks.

“Not sure, I lived at the south of the kingdom. Look, there’s a village down there. We’ll de-ice Bima, stock up on more food, and see if there aren’t any wrongs that need righting. There’ve been problems everywhere else we end up, why should this be any different?”

“Your resigned attitude toward your duty to the world is truly inspiring,” Rei says.

“Hey, no one offered me this job, I had it foisted on me. Go back to meditating. Or at least keep us warm, it’s frigid up here.”

“Is it? It must have slipped my notice.”

She shuffles over toward me and Nanuq, and her body heat is like a campfire right here in the saddle. Bima starts descending in a spiral to resist the wind, giving us a good view of the town we’re heading toward. It’s a decent size, larger than Seizhon or Patola but smaller than Shinden, with a port that probably doesn’t see much use in the winter, judging by the ice on the water and the lack of ships at the docks. No, there are two ships out in the water, but they’re not moving much beyond rocking with the waves. To the south is a thick, snow-capped forest extending some ways into the country, and just to the east is what looks like a smaller town made up of nothing but wind-battered tents. Odd.

“I need to land outside the town,” Yun says. “The village square looked like an option from farther up, but it’s just not big enough.”

“All right, I’ll make a shelter. Set down at the edge of the forest there, that’ll give Bima some cover from the wind.”

I hop down on our penultimate pass to clear the ground of snow, and I get an appreciative bison snort for my trouble. Back on earth Kingdom soil, back home. The only thing that feels strange is that I don’t feel much of anything at that. Bima tries to shake off the ice crystals that’ve formed on her fur, but Nanuq bends them all away once I pull a simple shelter into place next to the tree line. Yun gives her a few figs, and she seems quite content to slump down then and there while we start heading for the town.

“Bison choose their airbenders, don’t they?” I ask. “How’d Bima choose you?”

Yun looks back at the enormous, dozing creature. “She knocked me over for an apple I had in my robe. And it wasn’t even to offer to any of the bison to get one, it was mine, I hadn’t eaten that day. I couldn’t get her to stop following me around after that.”

“It’s kind of sweet,” Nanuq says. “Besides the part where you were tackled for food.”

Rei chuckles—that still needs some getting used to—and flicks some snow out of her hair, the only part of her that hasn’t become blazingly hot while the rest of the flurries melt around her and the slush at her feet recedes.

I wouldn’t expect a town to be bustling and vibrant in the middle of a snowstorm, but this place looks…dead on the outskirts, apart from the soldiers. Some of the rank and file are marching about with spears in groups of four, not doing much of anything apart from throwing dirty looks at anyone outside. One of them makes that mistake with me when we’re across the street, but quickly corrects herself when she sees I’m big enough to pick her up and bludgeon her fellows with her.

“Anyone see an inn?” I ask. “I’d ask for directions, but the soldiers don’t look like the friendly types.”

Rei points out one of the buildings in the village square, made of stone unlike its wooden neighbors. It’s as good a place to start as any. We hurry across the commons and slip inside.

The front room of the inn is scarcely any busier than the town outside, with only a few people sitting around the fire with their tea or baijiu. A man with some gray hair above his ears and an empty serving tray is gathering a few small teacups left by the handful of patrons, but he stops when he notices us brushing the snow off our shoulders. “Can I bring you anything?” he asks. His voice is weary, little more than a mumble.

“Four cups and a pot of jasmine tea,” Rei says as she points out a low table in the corner. “Boiling hot.”

He nods and retreats into another room. The other occupants look over at us as we sit down, but otherwise don’t pay us any mind. I wonder if being the Avatar involves nothing but falling headfirst into situations where I’ve got to help people. “Anyone have a take on all of this?” I ask.

Nanuq pulls off his mittens and the gloves underneath while Yun and I shrug off our coats. Rei’s providing more than enough heat for us. “I’m guessing soldiers walking around isn’t exactly normal,” he says, and I shake my head. “Then maybe we should find out what they’re doing here.”

“They were probably the ones who set up all those tents as a garrison,” Yun says. “They must be freezing.”

The proprietor comes back with a few cups for the other guests. We’re certainly not going to get any answers by pondering. “Hoy, innkeep, why’s the army here?”

I get about five dirty looks for my trouble, and some grumbling among the people by the fire as the innkeep shuffles over to our table. “Are you touched in the head, shouting like that with them around?”

“No, I’m the Avatar, and you should rethink insulting me if you want my help with whatever the problem is.”

He takes a step back for an appraising look, as if he expects to see the hànzi for _Avatar_ branded across my forehead. I hope the height and face paint become distinctive enough after a while so I don’t have to keep doing little demonstrations, but for the time being I spark some flame in one hand and bend my water skin dry with the other. “Yes, really. That tent city doesn’t make me think they’re a permanent garrison, so why are those soldiers here?”

“Taxes,” he says in a slightly more hopeful voice. “We’ve no money to pay them, so they’ve come to collect.”

“Was that not budgeted for?” Rei asks.

“Of course it was…until we had to buy food from traders coming in through the port. Most of our crop for the winter’s been stolen or destroyed. Bandits. Provincial governor told the bureaucrats as much, told them folks who starve can’t pay taxes _any_ year. They still sent near on three hundred soldiers to get the money, one way or another. Made sure _they_ had a supply line, too.”

I don’t imagine any of the people making such a decision back in Ba Sing Se have ever had to choose between taxes or food. The innkeep goes into the other room to get our tea, and I can see it’s not annoyance or suspicion on the faces of the other patrons. It’s desperation.

“They should have sent the bureaucrats,” Rei says as she absently flicks a few sparks from her thumb and first finger. “At least then the people would have something to eat. And the people here would have no one demanding taxes of them. That would have worked out nicely.”

Yun cringes as the innkeep comes back with our tea, the pot still whistling softly as I hand him some of the money Muryo gave us before we left Kasai. I hope that’s the dragon talking. The tea’s still much too hot to pour, but Rei does so anyway, holding her full cup in her hands while she waits for it to cool. Nanuq chills his down to a more manageable temperature, and Yun plays with the vapor coming off her cup.

“I want to see what’s going on up at that camp,” I say. Some of the wood in the fire nearby crumbles and crackles loudly. Rei really ought to wait a bit longer before downing that tea, considering her throat, but she doesn’t seem to mind it. “Can you three get a little more information on these bandits? See if the actual soldiers know what’s going on? They might not want to make things any worse if they know they’re trying to make wheat out of chaff.”

“You don’t want us to go with you?” Nanuq asks.

“We’ve all been stuck in a saddle together for, what, six days? It’s good to get a little alone time every now and then. Besides, Rei’s sparking at the fingers and suggesting cannibalism and I’d rather keep Water Tribe princes away from spears and miserable soldiers. Get some snow off the roofs, make the townsfolk like you. The soldiers are my people, they might be more agreeable with me. And we can cover more ground this way.”

Yun carefully sticks her tongue down past the rim of her cup, then pulls it back with a sharp, pained sound. “Still too hot…I can try to take Bima up, see if there are any neighboring towns that might be interested in trading. If I can get her out of the little hidey-hole you built.”

“Good, we’ll meet back here at sundown. And see if there’s anywhere else we can take on supplies, we probably won’t be buying any food from this place.”

Rei nods, downs another cup of tea, and then goes over to the other patrons near the fire. Nanuq leaves next after a quick kiss, pulling on his gloves and mittens as he goes out into the wind. I chill Yun’s tea a bit so she can at least have something in her belly before we step out together, parting after she squeezes me for warmth. She heads south, back the way we came along a path Nanuq’s started to clear on his way through the town, and I go east, toward the tent city we saw from the air.

We’ve been camping in Chikyu for the last few nights, but even now that I’ve had time to think it through, being back in my home country after more than a year isn’t making me feel much of anything. Maybe it’s the fact that I’m thousands of li from the only place I ever—reluctantly—called home, maybe it’s the storm of unpleasant memories swirling around me as sure as the snow. That, at least, I can bend away, and I cut a path as I go for the few villagers out and about, hurrying around with coats pulled tight and their hands up to guard against the wind.

Well, their food problem is painfully evident. A building near the edge of town that must be a storehouse is utterly empty, its doors thrown open to show as much. I doubt these bandits came in through the front, if the great big hole in one of the sidewalls is anything to go by. Everyone wants to skimp on paying a proper stonemason or an earthbender and use wood for their buildings instead, and this is what it gets them. I pull a crude stone cover into place so at least the elements can’t get in and damage what few empty containers are still inside.

“Hey! What’re you doing?”

“Putting up a proper wall,” I say without looking back at whoever’s doing the grumbling. “Thirty million earthbenders in this kingdom and you still build this shit out of wood, it’s like you _want_ it broken…oh. You’re not locals, are you?”

The four soldiers behind me grimace and grip their spears a bit tighter. “Let’s not fight, I just cleaned this road and I’m no good at bending blood yet.”

One of them trades a glance with another, and then the soldier with an extra stripe on his sleeve raises an eyebrow. “Were—were you earthbending or waterbending?”

“Both.”

They don’t seem to be getting it. “I’m the Avatar…? Kyoshi? _Raavashon_? _Touin_? I don’t remember how to say it in Tochi. Look, where’s your commander? I want to talk to whoever’s in charge of this occupation.”

“We’re here under orders, it’s not an occupation,” the sergeant says, a little indignant.

“Yes, I’m sure the secretariat told you to play the boot on these people’s necks, but I’m not going to let you starve them. Now you can take me to your commander and we can keep my good mood going, or I can find them myself and you’ll see what one of my bad moods look like.”

It’s probably stupid to threaten them so obviously, but the cold is sapping what little subtlety I have to begin with. The sergeant mutters something, jerks his head toward the camp, and I fall in behind them. The tips of their spears are only a tiny bit taller than me, which is all too amusing for some reason.

The camp is a stark change from the town. Some of the soldiers have bent small plows for themselves to keep the paths clear, not as efficient as waterbending but a smart workaround. Where the houses in town are built without any real plan or layout, bumping into each other in places and standing far apart in others, the camp’s tents are arranged in neat rows with people sitting around fires between them, not doing much of anything besides mumbling about the cold. There must be five or six times as many soldiers here as patrolling the town, they can’t all be off-duty…why waste the resources by having them here?

A slightly larger tent comes into view at the south end of the camp, with Earth Kingdom banners flapping in the wind outside the entrance. The soldiers immediately in front of me stop, and the sergeant goes up to speak with a woman with a slightly different uniform stepping out of the tent. She looks over his shoulder at me, then nods and waves me over. “You’re in charge here?” I ask.

“Second-in-command,” she says with a quick tap at the gold bar on her collar. “Just a lieutenant. I’ll go find the captain, you can wait here in the tent. Shouldn’t be long.”

Well, now we’re getting somewhere. I pull the tent flap back and slip inside, where it’s a tiny bit warmer. A small stove with a pipe extending up through the roof is in the middle of the small space, burning through a few pieces of wood to heat things up. The rest of the interior is fairly sparse. A map on a low table off to one side shows the town and surrounding countryside, dotted with a number of small figures on top and reports full of numbers beside it. A narrow bed with some thick blankets is on the opposite side of the tent, a little closer to the fire, and an armor stand is against the exterior wall near it, with a sheathed jian leaning on the bare pole. The only indulgences seem to be a stack of books next to the bed with their own small cushion to protect them from the ground, and a banner hung over the armor stand in old, formal Chikyan. “The top…the summit? Apex?”

“The true excellence in war is to achieve victory without fighting.”

I turn around and take a look at who’s interceded. There’s a man with dark green eyes and snow streaked through his light beard pulling the tent flap back into place, one with a uniform similar to the lieutenant from earlier, but with a more ornate design on the collar and the shoulder spaulders. He looks a little short of thirty if I were to guess, not much older than me, and his nose is slightly reddened from the cold. “An old military maxim,” he says as he brushes some snow away. “You do us too much honor with your presence, Avatar Kyoshi. Lieutenant Sheng said you were looking for me?”

“Yes, I was. I’m afraid you have me at a disadvantage, though.”

“Of course, where are my manners?” He bows deeply, making his armor _clink_ as he straightens back up. “I’m Captain Chin.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't usually do this, but if you've been enjoying the story I'd love to hear your thoughts. Throwing content out into the void to near-silence gets kind of discouraging after a while.


	37. The Captain and the Avatar

“Captain, then.”

This man, Chin, doesn’t seem perturbed at finding me in what’s very obviously his personal space. He simply goes about a routine, setting a teapot over the fire in the middle of the tent while I study him. “Can I interest you in some tea, Your Holiness?” he asks. “Military-grade, but still drinkable…if you drink it fast.”

“I’ve had some not an hour past, thank you. And please, it’s just Kyoshi.”

He nods and motions to one of the cushions at the table. We take our seats, with him holding a look at the map on the table before sitting down. “So. How may I help you, Kyoshi?”

“I came to the camp because I wanted to ask about your presence in this town. A matter of money, one person said? The army’s playing tax collector now?”

The mostly neutral expression on his face drops a bit, and he starts idly thumbing one of the figures on the map beside the town. “You heard true, we’ve been ordered here to oversee the collection of taxes, mostly excise from the trading port,” he says. “In coin or in goods. Things became more complicated when we saw all their food stores were bare. I can’t believe people who deal with winters like this every year didn’t prepare, which lent more credit to their stories of bandits. They certainly wouldn’t make a wreck of their own storehouses, at the very least.”

“So if you believe them, why are you still here? Drawing taxes out of a town shouldn’t require patrols or a weeks-long stay. And if they can’t pay, they can’t pay. Surely an army being here for so long costs more than what would be gained from due taxes from a place as small as this.”

His expression darkens again. “Unfortunately, the bureaucrats in the Finance Ministry don’t see it that way. You’ll notice there are only soldiers here, not mandarins. They don’t see the people going hungry, endlessly turning over their fields for any rice they may have missed. They don’t see people haggling desperately with the handful of Water Tribe ships that come through. All they see is a discrepancy in their tax tables, and that’s all they care about. Perhaps you can imagine that food shortages aren’t much a problem in the Upper Ring. When the real tax collectors came back empty-handed, the bureaucrat in charge of this province’s taxes sent us.”

My teeth grind painfully against my tongue. A bunch of scroll-pushers growing fat off moving money around rather than doing anything productive, of course. “Surely they have to realize that a starved-out town with no one in it can’t ever pay more taxes. They’d kill these people slowly to balance their books?”

“You’ve never been to the capital, have you?” he asks. I shake my head.

“I’ve been in Tochi and Hitenno for almost a year and a half. We were on our way to the Northern Water Tribe when we happened to stop here.”

“Perhaps it was fate that led your path to my camp, then,” Chin says. “The Upper Ring might as well be another world for the way they look at anyone who wasn’t born into it. The aristocracy has their fun, and the bureaucrats who clawed their way through the examination system will do anything to maintain their place on the periphery of that luxury. Including, yes, sending the army to collect taxes, even if it means a town might starve.”

A little gorge rises in my throat. We never had the displeasure of having such circumstances in Seizhon, but I need to focus on a problem that maybe I can do something about. “Tell me of the bandits, then. They can’t have eaten an entire season’s worth of food already, some of it might be recoverable.”

Chin lets go of the figure he’s been playing with and taps two fingers on the map’s representation of the forest, south of the town. “I’m afraid I can’t tell you much more than that there _are_ bandits. The villagers named the forest as their best guess for where they’re hiding, so I sent people in to reconnoiter. They never came back, so I sent another group to find them.”

“Let me guess…”

“Now I have sixteen soldiers missing and I don’t know any more than I did when I sent them off. The snow’s made it difficult to mount a larger search, and—” Chin presses his lips together, as if he’s trying to censor himself, but he gets over it— “the locals also spoke of some kind of monster working with the bandits. If you saw the outside of the storehouses, you’ll have noticed claw marks rather than earthbending impacts.”

“A monster? Well, Captain, maybe it _was_ fate that led me here. Monsters are something of a specialty of mine.” I bend some of my face paint off to show him the scars on my face. “I got these fighting a dragon last week. Anything less would be a good way to wind down.”

He grins while I reapply my paint. “I’d be very grateful for any assistance you could provide, Kyoshi. Shall we head over there?”

“My friends are still scattered around the town, I’d have to collect them.” I hope friendly Rei isn’t scaring anyone or melting anything that shouldn’t be melted. “And you wouldn’t be going yourself, would you?”

“Those are my soldiers I sent in there,” Chin says. “I won’t order any more into a situation I know nothing about. And finding your friends might burn what daylight we still have. All I want to do is a bit of reconnaissance.”

“Hmm.” I haven’t done much of anything without those three, but it’s only some poking around. I’ll hold off on any monster-fighting until I have them with me. Lightningbending is something I want to see in action, and this might end up being a good demonstration. “All right, Captain, I’ll go with you. Strictly as reconnaissance, though. Any fighting will have to wait until I can get Rei and Yun and Nanuq.”

We get up and he takes his teapot off the heat, undrunk. Based on the smell I can’t exactly fault him. “It sounds like quite the team you have. Hitennese, Water Tribe, and Air Nomad?”

“That’s right, and I round out the set.”

The snow isn’t falling quite so hard when we leave the tent, but I’m still grateful for my coat. “It’s fortunate for the villagers that it was you they sent,” I say as we start back down through the camp.

“Not that the bureaucrats would know, but I grew up in a place like this,” Chin says. “Out on Zhengfu Island, southeast of here. Poor farmers and fishers, the kind of people who feel every coin they pay in taxes.”

“And how’d you come to rise so high in the army?”

“There was a fort near where we lived, some of us would make a game out of seeing how close we could get before the guards came down to box our ears. One day I noticed a flaw in some of the outer defenses, and the commander was grateful when I told her of it. My parents were happy to let me go off to Ba Sing Se when she offered to sponsor me at the military academy, it wasn’t going to cost them anything and they wouldn’t have to feed me. After that…I did well, I suppose.”

“Your parents don’t sound too dissimilar from mine,” I say with a grimace. I’ve never heard Nanuq speak ill of his parents, but they might be the exception rather than the rule.

“I’m sorry to hear that. At least we’re here now, away from them. Ah…there _was_ a path here yesterday, before it snowed again.”

Well, that’s hardly a problem for me. The snow parts cleanly with one sharp thrust of my hand, shoving off to either side and exposing a path wide enough for us to walk abreast. He nods appreciatively. “I guess there are some extra benefits to being the Avatar.”

“It’s good to be useful.”

We skirt the town rather than going through it, and soon the forest looms in the distance, tall snow-laden trees standing silently in the midafternoon stillness. Bima’s little hut is off on the other side and out of sight, and we don’t go that way as we pass through the first smaller trees that mark the entrance. “Would you care to lead, Kyoshi?” Chin asks.

“Such a gentleman. I do plenty of leading as it is, it’ll be nice to follow for once. Besides, I don’t have any experience with military matters, so go ahead.”

I let him take a few steps before I continue behind him, clearing away some of the snow in front of us with one hand while keeping the other ready to deal with any earthbending ambushes. There’s less and less snow on the ground as we continue, trapped on the trees above us as it is, and once we’re under the largest trees it’s little more than a steady crunch under our feet rather than something to plow through.

A forest has a certain sound, countless animals breathing and shuffling around on the deadfall and in the trees. There’s none of that here. Everything’s gone to ground, and apart from our own boots crunching on the snow, it’s unsettlingly quiet. Of course, that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. “Wait…stay still a moment. I want to see if I can feel anything.”

This would probably work better if I took my boot off, but I’m not going to lose a toe to frostbite for some reconnaissance. Maybe that makes me a bad soldier. I slam my boot into the ground and focus. There are Chin’s vibrations as the most prominent disturbance, the background noise of the falling snow and some hibernating animals, and a large knot of activity deeper in the forest, along with something very big. Definitely not something I’d want to run into without the others. “That way,” I tell him, and we set off again.

“I’m going to have to ask about this dragon at some point,” Chin says.

“Oh, it was your average case of a dragon troubling the Western Air Temple, eating bison, keeping them from mating. It wouldn’t have a civil conversation and go back to Hitenno, so I did what I had to do. We’re fairly certain it’s living in my friend Rei now.”

“Come again?”

“She can bend lightning, though, so I think it all worked out in the end. And she can grin without whipping up a storm, too.”

He looks over his shoulder at me before going on. I suppose it sounds a bit odd without context. After a little while we start hearing noises that don’t belong in a forest, human voices and crackling fires. The cold of the snow bites through my clothes as we drop to a crawl, coming up on a ridge to get a better idea of what we’re dealing with.

It’s a bit over a dozen people bundled up in coats around a little circle of stone huts with fires burning in the middle. Unlike the townspeople, they don’t seem to be chafing under any shortage of food, not with the way they’re eating. Apart from the fact that they’d steal from honest townspeople and spend the day laughing about it, I don’t see anything that someone might call a…monster…

I’ve never seen a badger mole in person, but I just know they’re not supposed to look that morose or that thin. They’re not supposed to be caged up in wood, either. It seems so miserable without any earth to roll around in, slumped on the floor of its cage, and it looks like there’s something fastened around its neck. It’s shivering in the snowfall without the ability to pull up some shelter overhead, and I feel a pang of sympathy knife through me. I know how it feels to be a hungry, miserable earthbender, huddled up against the cold. The sympathy starts roiling into anger, bubbling up through my chest, and I try earthbending at a greater distance than I’ve ever accomplished before, if only to push a few chunks through the holes in the cage to give it something to play with. Its head picks up when it senses the earthbending, but doesn’t even bother scratching at its new toy. Poor thing.

“I count fourteen people, not including anyone who might be in those huts,” Chin mumbles, snow working into his beard as we lay there. “And the badger mole, of course. I suppose we’ve found the monster the townsfolk were talking about. No sign of my soldiers…all right, we should go back, maybe find this lightningbending friend of yours. Kyoshi?”

His voice is far away, as is the little yelp I hear from him as I stand up and go over the ridge. That badger mole doesn’t look like it’ll survive the night, or even the time it would take to get people back in here. Being around Bima so much has given me a soft spot for giant, fuzzy animals.

I get one of them in the back with a jutting piece of stone before they notice me, and twist the ground under two more to throw them off-balance before they can react. Someone hurls a large stone my way, but it’s easy to rip control away from him, spin it around my body, and send it back twice as hard.

The snow at my feet melts and then turns to ice around my boots in an attempt to lock me in place. I’m a waterbender too, unfortunately for them. Some of the jeers die in their throats as I pull the ice up and make little spikes for myself. They go flying without any intent to kill anyone, but they do dig through their clothes and scratch at their skin before I force them to melt.

One suicidally brave bandit, probably not a bender, comes running at me with a sword, then goes flying across a patch of ice I bring up through the snow. Chin’s come skittering down the ridge by now and sends two the bandits who were trying to flank me into the wall of one of the huts. “What happened to scouting?” he asks as he rips up a chunk of earth and hurls it toward the fire.

“I don’t like seeing animals mistreated.”

We both have to jump back when a swath of fire comes arcing toward us. All they need now is an airbender. Hmm…I grab my fans.

They were woefully overmatched even before they realized they were dealing with the Avatar. Whirling them all around their camp and leaving them strewn about in the snow is just an extra little bit of humiliation. The wind howls as it carries them, tossing them over themselves and dropping them all over the place. Their groaning replaces the wind once it dies away, leaving us free to look around the camp after rounding them up and tying them together with some loose rope.

“Found the food,” Chin says with his head in one of the huts. At least three of them are absolutely filled with rice, grains, salted meat…I’m hungry. One of the huts we look in has a stack of tattered army uniforms inside, along with a few swords and spears propped up against the walls. There’s no sign of their owners, but the blood on the fabric and armor isn’t a good sign. Chin nudges past me and picks up one of the uniforms, cold resignation creeping across his face as he thumbs at the fabric. “Maybe being hopeful was too much.”

“Do you need a moment?” I ask, and he nods. “All right. I’ll go see about the badger mole.”

Even all the excitement of the fight wasn’t enough to rouse the animal from its tired, languorous pose, scratching its ears every so often but otherwise largely uninterested in anything around it. Up close, I can see why. There’s some kind of crude collar made of wood and metal fastened far too tightly around its neck, drawing out low, heartbreaking whimpers as it struggles to breathe. Its sightless eyes follow the sound of my footsteps as I move around the cage, and it tries to shrug away from me in the vanishingly small space it has.

“All right, how’s this thing lock,” I mumble, and push a crossbar out of place on the front. The front creaks open on heavy hinges, and the badger mole perks up a bit only to yelp in pain and claw at that awful collar. “Easy, easy…let me try and take this thing off. What the hell did they do to you?”

It’s trembling by the time I step into the cage, and when I push back some of its fur to get at the collar I can see healed-over scar tissue on its skin, thick knotty lines that remind me too much of my own body. The collar itself has hard metal points jutting off each side that dig into the skin, and the wood is older and splintered, bearing more scratch marks than I can count. “Where’s the latch on this thing?”

Despite my searching and the badger mole’s cooperation, there isn’t any catch or release I can find. Whoever made this didn’t intend to remove it. All right, Kyoshi, think. It whimpers whenever I put pressure on the collar, so I have to find a way to snap it that doesn’t send the whole thing digging into its throat.

I pull up a few handfuls of snow, melt it, and bend it into the nearest part of the collar. The wood darkens with moisture, and soon it becomes difficult to force in any more. Once I’ve got a section sopping wet, I reach back in for the water through the wood, latching onto every droplet I can feel, and force it frozen again.

The wood groans, and the badger mole whimpers as it tries to claw at the contraption. “It’ll be all right, baby, I know it hurts. I’m working on it.”

I know it’s an animal—an enormous animal, fifteen times my size at least—but there still seems to be an understanding in its movements. It seems to know I’m not one of the people who penned it up. I probably smell better. At the section I froze, the wood’s begun to splinter, and I melt more snow to try again.

On the third try, the collar snaps and falls to the bottom of the cage. Finally. “There you go,” I say, and pet behind one of its ears. “That feel better?”

Apparently it doesn’t like having its ear scratched, because it bats me away onto the snow with a swipe of its head and then pounces on me, fangs bared. So much for understanding. The little dots of moisture at the corners of its eyes drip into the fur on its face and frost over as it studies me and I study it in return. Oh, it’s female. I send soft little pulses through the ground to her paws, and that makes her push her feet against the dirt under the snow. The realization seems to hit after a moment that she’s free.

Her tongue is rough and crackly against my face as she licks me, and then she slumps happily on the ground to start playing with the earth surrounding her. Her tail thumps into the snow as she bends everything around her, digging wildly, without direction, happy to be back in her native element. Instead of little whimpers, I hear snorts and grunts. Chin comes out of the hut to see what’s suddenly started shaking the forest, but I wave him off. “That’s a good girl,” I say with another soothing pulse through the soil. “Good girl. You’re not a monster, are you? If anything, you look like a big mooncake someone left a little too long in the oven. Hmm. You like that name? Mooncake?”

 Her tail starts thumping against the ground again. There’s something in her teeth, and my stomach twists a little when I take it out and see it looks like a scrap of an army uniform. Well…the bandits probably didn’t give her much choice in her diet. I slip it into my robes. “All right, let me up, we’ve got to figure out how to get all this food back to town. Think you can help with that?”

Mooncake’s head tilts slightly as she backs up to let me stand. “Captain Chin?” I ask. He comes out of the hut with the uniforms tucked under his arm. “We’re going to need a sled.”

The sacks of rice and grain stack easily on the thick slab of earth we pull from the ground, and with our guidance Mooncake nudges it with her head and front claws back to the town. The bandits don’t stack quite as easily with their restraints, but we’re not terribly concerned about their comfort.

“I’ll get some of my soldiers to bring the food back into the storehouses,” Chin says when we get to the edge of town. “And then I’ll decide what to do with these lowlifes. The people here might have gone hungry if you hadn’t come by, I’m not sure they know how lucky they are. It makes me fear for these people to think if they had sent someone less understanding in my stead. The government is so woefully out of touch these days, it seems.”

“So it seems. Maybe I can knock some heads until they start seeing reason.”

That pulls a smile out of him. “Now that I’d like to see. I’m with the Second Army in the Middle Ring garrison, feel free to write in between all your good deeds. Thank you your help today, Kyoshi.”

“All part of the Avatar business, I think. None of my past lives have come by yet to tell me I’m doing it all wrong. It’s almost sundown, so if you’ll excuse me, I have some friends to make jump out of their skin.”

He raises an eyebrow, but bows and then heads off toward the army camp. I give Mooncake a little pat on her snout. “There’s one more thing I think you could help me with.”

I see them before they see me. Yun and Nanuq are huddled around Rei in front of the inn, looking off in the opposite direction as I approach. One of the perks of being an earthbender is that it’s easy to mask footfalls on just about any scale. I get as close as I dare and then give a good shout.

“Hey, look what I found!”

Yun clutches her chest and goes pale as a sheet. Rei’s eyes actually widen. Nanuq squeaks in a voice higher than mine. “Kyoshi,” Yun says cautiously, still trying to get a hold on her heart palpitations, “are you aware that there’s a very large…badger mole under you?”

“I named her Mooncake!” I say, and reached down to scratch her head. She likes that now. “It didn’t take much convincing to let me ride her, either. Come pet her!”

Rei’s the first one to take a few cautious steps toward us and put her hand out for Mooncake to sniff. “That’s Rei, she’s half-dragon.”

“I am not ‘half-dragon’—”

She stops when Mooncake puts her nose against her stomach for the warmth. “Oh.”

Yun and Nanuq join her after a moment, and the badger mole seems very happy with the gentle attention, setting herself down right there on the street. “We saw soldiers carting food to the storehouses,” Nanuq says. “I guess you solved the problem?”

“We found the bandits, and the food they stole. I was going to come find you to help clear them out, but they had this poor thing penned up and I couldn’t leave her there. So we…dealt with it. Come on, let’s go find rooms and a meal,” I say, and slip down from Mooncake’s back. She bumps me with her nose and gives a questioning whimper. “We’ll be going to the Northern Water Tribe, there’s no earth there. Besides, this is your home, isn’t it? You don’t have to sit in a cage ever again. Now go on, you’re starting to get some looks.”

She nuzzles my head and sends three short pulses through the ground, which I match before she opens up the street and burrows under the town. I close the breach once she’s gone and head inside with the others.


	38. The Northern Water Tribe

What initially looks like a massive ice floe on a darkened horizon grows more and more as we approach, climbing up from sea level until it looks more like an iceberg. But it’s neither, or it isn’t anymore.

The ice-and-snow spires in the rising ring-like levels of the Northern Water Tribe thrust up from a massive peninsular ice sheet on the frigid polar waters. A little ways from the largest of half a dozen harbors, icebreaker ships are moving in a cycle, with waterbenders on board keeping the shipping lanes clear for other ships. Once we get a bit closer, I can see that most of the little bits of ice around the main sheet are actually fishing boats, painted white for visibility in the shred of sunlight coming in from the southeast.

“It doesn’t just…float, does it?” Yun asks from ahead of the saddle, nudging Bima lower in the air for our approach.

“They could probably disconnect the peninsula if they really wanted to, but no, it’s attached overland to the rest of the northern ice sheet,” Nanuq says. “Otherwise they couldn’t get to the spirit oasis or the ice forest at the North Pole. In fact, they do the opposite to defend it, and bring in more ice around it as a bulwark.”

Rei shuffles up beside me at the edge of the saddle to look at it. She’s finally wearing her coat, but she seems to have a wistful little look in her eye every time she looks at the open air. Most of the time I’m left wondering if I’ll need to keep her from jumping out and trying to fly. “What do they walk around on, exactly,” she says, wondering aloud. “More ice? Did they import a layer of topsoil?”

Nanuq shakes his head. “Ice and thick boots. All the soil’s in glasshouses for growing crops in the bright months.”

Bima gets low enough to cause a wake in the water, and plenty of the fishing boats turn toward us to take in the unfamiliar sight. Some of the ones behind us rock in our wake, and soon the main harbor looms in front of us in the polar twilight. “Bima’s not going to like strolling around on ice,” Yun says.

Some of the smarter dockhands scramble to get out of the way of the giant flying bison early, while others need a little more time for their survival instincts to kick in. As expected, Bima slips and slides a bit on the ice when she lands, until the dockhands roll out several pelts for her to rest on.

“Are you confident with your Shuishei?” Nanuq asks.

“It’s a little late for more lessons,” I say as we hop down. My coat is keeping most of the cold away from my body, but my face paint is a terrible insulator. Seems like I’ll just have to deal with it, but damn it’s cold. The ice isn’t perfectly flat, but textured slightly for traction. Rei’s the last one to climb down, and we all turn around at the hissing sound she makes. A little steam’s rising from around her boots until she takes a breath and vents her body heat elsewhere. “Don’t melt the whole place, Rei.”

“None of you were complaining when you cuddled me for heat every night on the way here.”

“You bond with a dragon and make a furnace out of yourself, expect to be cuddled,” I say. “We’ll give you a break in the summer. Now…where are we going, exactly? Do we know where Tiaraq is? Or if he’s even still here?”

Nanuq takes out a small stack of papers from his pocket and looks over the topmost one. “The last letter that got to me at Shudan said he was staying at the palace, it’s as good a place as any to start looking. It’s the big ice building up there, on the topmost level. And I doubt he left, we were expecting this whole venture to take a while.”

Apart from the odd wooden structure, there doesn’t look to be much other than big ice buildings, but I follow him anyway once we settle Bima’s lodging. Despite how it looked from the air, the tribe is fairly built up, with intricately-arranged streets, bridges over canals with water locks for moving between levels, and homes built with a mixture of ice, stone, and wood. There are lanterns hanging from almost every surface where they can be mounted, shunning some of the dark hanging over the whole place. It looks more like a city than what I’d pictured in my mind, but I’ve never seen Water Tribe settlements, either, so maybe it’s my provincialism showing.

“Is there any daylight to look forward to?” Rei asks with a glance skyward. This probably isn’t the most comfortable place for a firebender.

“Sorry, no,” Nanuq says. “We’re just past the polar latitude and it’s right after the winter solstice, so there probably won’t be much more than a few hours of twilight every day for at least a month.”

Rei sighs and tucks her hands into her coat.

“Well, so far nothing seems amiss and no one’s asked for my help with anything,” I say, but I keep a wary eye out. “So either they don’t know who I am, or they’re waiting. Waiting until I get turned around and walk into an alley or something where I can’t escape.”

Yun looks over at me from behind the fluffy fringe of her coat’s hood. She wasn’t thrilled about wearing something with animal fur, but apparently fennec raccoons like having their tails shaved every now and then. “It _is_ your job, you know. Keeping balance, righting wrongs.”

“I know, but…I’d like to sit down for an hour when we go somewhere new. It’s rough on my back, being so tall while I’m running around, helping people.”

Building houses and pit fighting every night wasn’t much easier on my body, but at least I didn’t have a moral imperative for that. Oh well. Maybe I’m still getting used to the whole Avatar business.

Rei’s still leaving slight indentations in the ice where she walks when we arrive at the foot of the palace, carved appropriately from what looks like a small iceberg’s worth of ice and set in a large plaza full of fountains pools. Several of the columns flanking the stairs are colored with a slight green tinge, which Nanuq explains is in imitation of the spirits that create the aurora at night. Others are frosted to opacity like the walls, and a few are almost perfectly clear, allowing a slightly distorted view of everything on the other side of them.

The guards let us through once I do my little bending demonstration to prove I really am the Avatar—I should send out flyers or something—and the front hall is every bit as lavish as Kasai’s palace. Thick, high arches support the ceiling, stretching back to the far end of the room, while hanging from them are more sensible metal chandeliers holding dozens of candles each. There are rising sets of seats on three sides of the room, and behind the one opposite us, flanked by thick decorated columns, is a waterfall nearly as wide as the room itself. Great big stone hearths line the walls on the left and right with fires blazing inside, and the floor is covered in nice, warm pelts. I can almost forget that it’s hovering right around freezing in here. Almost.

Among the people milling about the hall, we don’t see Tiaraq, but eventually someone stops us to ask if we need directions. He looks like some kind of steward, dressed in plainer a plainer robe and coat than the courtiers and petitioners wandering around. Most of the exchange between him and Nanuq is too fast for me to process out of Shuishei and back into Chikyan, but there’s some gesturing at me, and I catch all our names, plus my title. _Raavashon_. The steward gets a bit more deferent after that, and eventually he turns to me with a bow. “Avatar Kyoshi,” he says, mercifully slowly. “Welcome to Shuibei. Would you all follow me to meet the chief?”

I can get into a lot of neat places, being the Avatar and all. Rei rolls her eyes, but doesn’t complain as Yun and I latch onto her sides for warmth with Nanuq in front of us. There’s a very artful, if morbid, tapestry depicting the tribe’s history on a length of what looks like whale skin that we’re led under, through a pair of thick wooden doors flanked by guards to a smaller room.

The floor here is stone with pelts on top, making it a bit warmer through my boots, and two hearths make it much better. Across the room, on a throne carved from ice and covered in thick pelts—I’m sensing a theme—is a man of maybe fifty with three long braids of brown hair draped over one shoulder and a full beard across the whole lower half of his face, where a little gray is creeping in at the sides. His clothes, mostly white with dark blue accents around the collar and sleeves, look quite a bit thinner than I’d expect for someone who sits on a block of ice all day. Framed by the little wrinkles on either side, he also has some of the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen, carefully scanning a stack of documents in the hands of another steward.

“How do you expect them to be able to pay their tax if they aren’t allowed to make any money?” he’s asking the steward beside him, who seems to be turning a bit red in the cheeks. “Do you think the money will fall from the sky? Reinstate their fishing permits and grant them extensions by the end of the day.”

The steward inclines his head and hurries past us, trying to escape the chief’s withering gaze on the back of his neck, which leads him to us. We get a few careful, appraising looks before the chief leans forward a bit on his throne and clasps his hands together in his lap. “Who is it you’ve brought me, Sesi?”

Our steward takes a step aside and gestures to us with a flourish. “Your Excellency, may I present Her Holiness the Avatar, Lady Kyoshi of Chikyu, and her retinue: Second Prince Nanuq of the Tayagun, Lady Takarabe Rei of Hitenno, and Lady Yun of Azuma-Tochi. Your Holiness, it is my honor to introduce His Excellency, Chief Anyu of the Shuibei and Shuinan tribes.”

We all give our little bows to him, though Nanuq is noticeably stiff with his. The chief stands and reciprocates, then takes a few steps off the dais the throne is set on. “Be welcome, Avatar and friends,” Anyu says, and offers me his hand when he’s a bit closer. I grasp his forearm. Firm grip, like an earthbender. “I wish you had come a few days earlier for the New Year celebrations, that’s when you would’ve seen the tribe at its best.”

“Unfortunately, I was dealing with a dragon at the time for the Western Air Temple,” I say. Now that I have the sound of the language around me, it’s easier to slip into it myself. “I have no doubt it was lovely here, though.”

“A dragon?” He shudders, maybe at the thought of so much fire raining down. “I’m sure you slew the beast? One dragon couldn’t have been much of a match for a bear of a woman like yourself.”

Rei presses her lips together in a thin line and gets a tiny bit warmer. Is bear a compliment? Is that even the word he used? I can’t just stand here and figure it out in my head, he’s expecting me to say something.

“It all worked out, and the new scars are becoming, at least.”

“A good hunt, then!”

Yun has to grab Rei’s arm to keep her still as Anyu goes back to his throne. He’s on in his years, but still moves with a powerful frame under all those layers. “So. How may I be of service to the Avatar?” he asks. “Have you come to learn waterbending, perhaps? Or visiting the spirit oasis? Whatever it is, I hope you can stay long enough for my eldest daughter’s wedding at the end of the month.”

“Prince Nanuq has been more than helpful for teaching me waterbending,” I say, and put a gloved hand on his shoulder. “I wouldn’t mind taking in a few lessons from your masters, though. Perhaps a healer or two, I take a lot of hits. And we would be honored to attend your daughter’s wedding. But we did come here for a reason, we’re looking for Nanuq’s elder brother, Prince Tiaraq of the Tayagun tribe. Is he still here in Shuibei?”

Anyu cocks his head to the side, then grins. “I should certainly hope so, let me summon him for you. Sesi, please see Prince Tiaraq in.”

The steward who led us in nods and slips out of the room. Well, that was surprisingly easy. I was sure on the way here that I was going to hear about some great calamity I would have to resolve before the chief could pay any mind to such small matters. It’s too early to make a very accurate judgement, but he seems decent enough, waiving nonsensical fees so people can keep living. Of course, my standards for government officials are still fairly low after the business in Chikyu with the taxes.

“But as long as I _am_ here, where would I find your main temple?” I ask. “I forgot to ask the Air Nomads to formally confirm my accession, I keep irritating the Earth Sages, and the senior Fire Sages were…removed from their positions while I was in Kasai.”

“The main temple?” Anyu scratches at his chin. “To whom? There’s the Moon Hall, that’s the largest temple to Tui, the temples to La on the waterfront, temples for Akna, Sila, Sedna, the other temples for the different traditions of each—you’ll have to be more specific, Avatar Kyoshi.”

“Just ‘Kyoshi’ is fine, please. Is there one that you recommend? I’d rather not be accused of partisanship.”

He invites us to sit on some of the cushions near the hearth on one side of the room while he thinks about it. “Why’re you suddenly worried about this now?” Yun asks as she shuffles up next to me.

“I’m running out of religious authorities to annoy, I should get this done before they all hate me.”

“There’s the spirit oasis,” Anyu says. “It’s a bit north of the tribe, but I can’t think of a better spot. It’s where your predecessor would enter the spirit world to try and save his love Ummi from the clutches of the evil spirit Koh, the Face-Stealer.”

“All his other loves must have waited with bated breath for his safe return,” Rei says quietly, and I have to bite my lip to keep from laughing. Sure, Avatars are always famous, but rarely for the same things. Yangchen was prodigious with all her bending forms, Kuruk was more prodigious in the matter of family trees. Then, in a more respectful tone she says, “The Avatar would be honored to have her accession confirmed there.”

She must have been paying attention when Nanuq was teaching me Shuishei. And she did drop into his body when we were at Shudan, I guess she picked it up like everything else. Anyu nods. “I’ll have it arranged. We don’t see many Fire Nation folk here, to tell you the truth. Must be the cold that keeps them away.”

“We prefer to see the sun _every_ day,” Rei says with half a smile. “And our beaches are nicer.”

The chief’s face starts to screw up in a scowl, but then he laughs. “I like this one! I hope you all haven’t made other arrangements yet, we have plenty of room here in the palace. Will you stay as my guests?”

It’s good that news hasn’t spread of what happened to the last guest wing we stayed in. As long as we can avoid power-hungry chancellors, I’m optimistic about our chances here. I give him a nod. “That would be fine, thank you.”

The door opens again, but it’s a woman who files in, the bottom of her heavy blue cloak and its fine white fur trim trailing on the ground behind her. She has the same almost-too-blue eyes as the chief, and an intricate headpiece of small silver links and blue sapphires is pinned into her carefully-arranged hair. She doesn’t look much older than us, but she certainly carries herself differently. Tiaraq, with a bit of a beard and having let the hair on the sides of his head grow in, shuffles in after her, and Nanuq jumps up from his seat. By the time the rest of us stand up, he’s already crossed the space between them and grabbed his older brother in a crushing hug, much to the bewilderment of the woman who came in first.

“Nanuq!” he says as he gets over his shock and returns the embrace. “What—what are you doing here?”

“What, I can’t miss you?” Nanuq asks as they pull apart. Tiaraq’s wolf tail is resting a little lower on his head than I remember, dipping farther down the back of his neck. “It’s been months. I would’ve taken Kara or Seleq, I was starting to get so homesick. And when did you start with this beard? You look like Father.”

“It was my idea, actually,” says the woman who came in before him, casting a cool glance over Nanuq that she quickly turns to the rest of us. It isn’t quite rude or haughty, but it could quickly move that way if she wrinkles her nose. Rather than do that, one of her hands goes up to the necklace around her throat, simple blue silk with a small seafoam-blue pendant hanging from the front. “I see we have guests.”

Anyu stands up and gestures to each of us in turn. “Sanara, this is Avatar Kyoshi and her group, Lady Rei, Lady Yun, and Prince Nanuq.”

She gives me a little bow, and though I never feel slighted by a lack of obeisance, she’s making me reconsider my stance. “Welcome to the Northern Water Tribe, Your Holiness. It’s my honor to make your acquaintance.”

“Likewise, I’m sure.”

“Kyoshi, this is my eldest daughter, Crown Princess Sanara. And of course you already know her betrothed, Prince Tiaraq.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, it’s Tiaraq! [Remember him](http://i.imgur.com/rph1f0P.jpg)? (The one on the right)


	39. Political Realities

Nanuq’s face hasn’t quite caught up with his mind, and his smile stays fixed on while he looks between Tiaraq, Sanara, and Anyu. It’s a bit unsettling, really. Usually his smile is bright and warm and a little goofy, but this is tense, uncomfortable. My water skin ripples as he starts to process what he’s heard, but he manages to keep himself diplomatic. “Congratulations,” he finally says, clapping Tiaraq on the back with a little more force than is really necessary. “I must’ve missed the letter where you mentioned this.”

Tiaraq tugs at his collar, but Sanara grabs his arm before he can say anything. “You didn’t tell your own brother?” she asks, putting on a painfully transparent pout. “You’re not ashamed of me, are you?”

“No! No, I…they were going all over the Fire Nation. I wasn’t sure how to get in touch with him. Could I have a moment with my brother? Maybe I’ll show them to their rooms.”

Sanara sighs, but lets go of his arm all the same. “There should be enough space in the guest wing,” Anyu says with an absent wave of his hand. “Sanara and I have a few more details to work out with the ceremony seating as it is.”

Nanuq only just barely waits for him to finish speaking before grabbing Tiaraq around the shoulders and marching him out of the office, leaving us to follow. “It’s—it’s the other way!” Tiaraq says, and Nanuq, without missing a beat, wheels them both around and down another hall. “Nanuq, let me explain!”

“Oh, please do,” he says under his breath. All the while Tiaraq is trying to give Nanuq directions through the chilly palace halls, pointing and motioning his brother along. “I can’t wait to hear this. When is Mother arriving to choke the life out of you?”

“Difficult family,” Rei says.

Eventually we all pile into a single guest room, and Rei wastes no time in setting the hearth and candles ablaze while Tiaraq chases after a pacing Nanuq. He pauses for a moment when he bumps into Rei, and both of them look at each other, smiling a bit, before I remember that they never met. “Tiaraq, this is Rei, my firebending teacher. She’s half-dragon now.”

“I am _not_ half-dragon,” she growls, then bows. “Well met, Your Highness. Congratulations on your betrothal.”

“Don’t congratulate him!” Nanuq says, still pacing around the room. “What in Sanna’s name are you up to, Tiaraq? Mother sent us here to petition for expanded fishing rights, not marry the heir to the tribe that keeps trying to carve away at our territory!”

“Are you going to let me explain?” he asks, and when Nanuq stops wearing a groove in the floor we all sit around the room. I sit behind him and wrap my arms around his waist, half for some comfort, half to keep him from leaping up and going off on another tirade. “All right, yes, I know this isn’t what Mother asked us to do. Just like she didn’t ask you to go off and train the Avatar. But think about it. I’ll have more access to the chief this way. We’ll get to exist without the Shuinan pressing on us all the time.”

“Exist how? There used to be eight tribes up here at the North Pole before the Shui absorbed or conquered them. What makes you think it’ll be any different for us? We’ll be their subjects, not their sister tribe. You saw it happen to the Iqtala and the Verkodaq.”

“How different are we from them?” Tiaraq asks. Nanuq squirms in my grip. “We eat the same food, speak the same language, we have the same gods, but we live in huts. Is it the huts you’re defending, or Mother’s need to be in control?”

“You’ve been here too long, that lack of sunlight is messing with your brain. Now what happened, really?”

Tiaraq bites his lip and draws his legs up closer to his chest. “There was a festival for the solstice about two weeks ago, I had a bit too much baijiu, and I…I woke up in the crown princess’s bed,” he says, leading to a stifled laugh from Yun and a hand on his shoulder from Rei. “She started in with all this marriage talk, I didn’t have a chance to set things straight with her, we had only talked a few times at court before that.”

I don’t see Nanuq roll his eyes, but I’m almost sure he’s doing it. “How about saying, ‘I’m sorry, I got a bit drunk last night, you seem very nice but I don’t want to marry you’?”

“Do you think the chief would be very open to answering my petitions if he found out I deflowered his daughter and then refused to marry her?” Tiaraq asks. Nanuq grumbles, but he doesn’t have a retort beyond crossing his arms and shifting against me. “I’ll admit, I got carried away, and this wasn’t the outcome anyone wanted. She’s pretty, but a little touchy about getting all the wedding details exactly the way she wants them. But if it can work for us, why not go along with it?”

“Because you’re a prince of the Tayagun,” Nanuq says exasperatedly, and slumps in my grip. “Even if neither of us are ever going to inherit the tribe, that’s got to count for something. And I saw you carved her a necklace, you didn’t even make her a betrothal knife. You did what _her_ tribe wanted.”

“You didn’t make me a knife, Nanuq,” I say with a little poke in his side, but my attempt at levity goes unappreciated.

Tiaraq blinks. “Are you two…I thought you and Yun were together?”

I grab Yun with one hand and squeeze them both. “Let’s worry about _your_ relationship issues for now.”

“So this is a political matter?” Rei asks. Her Shuishei is better than mine, that’s hardly fair. “This betrothal is an attempt to save face after a night of drunken passion?”

“It sounds bad when you put it like that,” Tiaraq says, “but yes. What can the pond do for the falling leaf but send ripples in its wake?”

Rei cocks her head, then smiles. “That poem sounds so refreshingly new in Shuishei.”

“All right, so we can still figure a way to get you out of this,” Nanuq says. “Maybe Kyoshi can yank you away on some Avatar business or something, Rei sends a lightning bolt down from one of the ice floes, and Sanara thinks you’re dead. It could work, couldn’t it?”

“I think he should just be honest with her.” Yun pulls her coat tighter around herself in between little puffs of breath. “It might be uncomfortable, but doesn’t she deserve the truth?”

“The _truth_ is that they could wipe out our tribe if they wanted to, Yun,” Tiaraq says with a sigh. “This was my mistake, I have to be the one to deal with it. So I’m not faking my death, and I’m not sitting her down for that conversation. Ugh, I can just imagine the yelling…all I can do is try to make this work as best I can. I know you’re not happy about this, Nanuq, but please. I need this to go well.”

He’s quiet for a long time, barely moving against me even when I scratch at his chest through his coat. “Fine,” he says. “I won’t mess this up for you. But I’m not going to help you, either.”

“I understand. I should get back. There’ll probably be some kind of dinner for you all later on, I’ll come get you for that. Kyoshi, Yun, it’s good to see you again. Nice to meet you, Rei.”

Tiaraq gets up and slips out of the room, leaving Nanuq grumbling in my arms. Even stroking his hair, which is usually so effective, does nothing to soothe him. “Come on, we’re going for a walk. You need to cool off.”

“I’m fine,” he mutters, but Yun and I pick him up anyway.

“Rei? You want to come along?” I ask.

She shakes her head and runs her hand over one of the pelts on the bed. Warm layers or not, sheets on stone on ice probably won’t be overwhelmingly comfortable for a few days. “No, thank you. I need some time to make the room across the hall a bit more comfortable.”

“Don’t melt the place with your crazy dragon heat.”

“How blessed are we to have such a droll Avatar,” Rei says before walking out.

I grab Nanuq’s shoulder, but he folds his arms. “I’m fine, Kyoshi. I just need a few hours.”

“Yeah, but this’ll be faster.”

“Wha—”

He squirms and struggles, but ultimately he can’t stop me from picking him up and laying him across my shoulders. Yun snickers as she follows us out of the room, and I have to imagine that Nanuq’s indignant look isn’t helping her keep her composure. “Are you going to come along quietly?” I ask. “There’s one right answer here, the others get you dropped.”

“I’m a prince!” he says, but his annoyance is slowly losing out to laughter.

“Oh, right. The others get you dropped, Your Highness.”

He stops squirming, so I put him down and pull him into my side. “Better?”

“It’s been a long time since a woman picked me up and carted me off, I was starting to miss it. Did she ever do that to you, Yun?”

“Only when she got frustrated with my meditation lessons,” she says as she hurries up to my other side. The corridors are a bit colder than the rooms, and once we get to the front hall we have to stop in front of one of the hearths for a few minutes. “Are you all right, though? Really?”

“I—I just didn’t see this coming.”

Any twilight there had been before is gone, and now it’s only lanterns and torches illuminating the way around the palace plaza and beyond. We might as well see this spirit oasis and make sure it’s a good spot for accession ceremonies. Kuruk probably had his there, too. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. I can’t read any of the Shuishei on the signs, so Nanuq has to direct us.

“You don’t think Tiaraq has a point about any of this?” I ask.

Nanuq pushes his hair back and looks up at the darkened sky. “It’d be like…if a bunch of nobles from Ba Sing Se set up a city right next to where you lived and kept trying to push into your boundaries. And cut off your hunting grounds. And marry into your town so your young people moved there. Meanwhile, all your songs and stories and customs slowly get replaced with theirs, and you can’t do anything about it because they have more money and more soldiers. I know our mother wants to hold onto her power, but it’s more than that. We’re not Shui, we’re Tayagun. Just because they’re not using spears doesn’t mean they’re not trying to get rid of us and everything that makes us distinct. Now Tiaraq’s just going to speed up the process. I didn’t imagine this coming from him, that’s all.”

“I lived so close to you for three years, I had no idea it was like that at the South Pole,” Yun says.

“We didn’t really have anyone to turn to, so we kept it to ourselves. The Fire Nation uses Shui fleets for shipping—or they did, if Muryo sent those agreements to my mother—the Earth Kingdom bureaucracy is too much of a mess to help in less than fifty years, and the Air Nomads don’t have a government we could’ve gone to for help.”

“Don’t forget that you’ve got me now, too,” I say. “The Shuinan can push on you, but I can push back pretty hard.”

“You’d involve yourself like that?”

“I’m your Avatar, too. Keeping balance is my job.”

He warms up a little at that, but he’s still not back to his cheerful self.

One of the buildings we pass is selling soup, and we stop for a few bowls of miso. They actually have something vegetarian for Yun, though the seaweed in it doesn’t look very appetizing. I think I’ll stick with the fish option. “I wonder what this accession ceremony is actually like. It’s not like anyone is going to challenge my claim to being the Avatar, are they?”

Yun shrugs. “Rei was drooling over a painting of Yangchen’s ceremony when we were at the Western Air Temple, but it only showed her sitting there in front of some of the other nuns. Maybe you’ll finally get to relax for an hour like you wanted.”

“Wouldn’t that be a nice change…”

It’s a little strange to see a place so active at what my mind wants to interpret as nighttime. People are at a marketplace lit by countless torches, buying food or new pelts or little trinkets carved from stone and jade. A few sailors back from a stretch on a fishing boat are shooting whalebone dice for some Earth Kingdom coins at one of the stalls, and a few little kids bundled up in four or five layers marvel at my height. I bend a tiny bit of my face paint from around my eye onto one of their noses. As odd as this is, I can’t imagine the summer solstice, when the sun never quite sets and everyone has to shut out the world to get a few hours of sleep. The midnight sun, Nanuq calls it. I think I’d go mad.

“Anyone offering odds on whether I’ll annoy these sages, too?” I ask. “Three to one, maybe?”

“That’s hardly fair, you’ve already done it twice,” Yun says. “No, three times. You annoyed my mother, too. Although, in your defense, she’s easy to annoy. It didn’t sound like you thought your mother would be too pleased about all this earlier, Nanuq. Is she, ah…easily annoyable, too?”

He sweeps some snow off the railing of a bridge into the water below. “She’s proud. Wants to make our tribe more prominent on the world stage. She tries, but at the end of the day the Shuinan have more waterbenders and more soldiers, so most of what she does amounts to keeping things the way they are. I don’t know. Maybe she’d strangle Tiaraq for getting himself into this mess, maybe she’d try to use it to her advantage. I’ve never been good at thinking like her.”

Yun nods. “I haven’t ever been able to think like my mother, either.”

I’m glad they don’t turn to me for another example. The less said about my family, the better. As we turn and head farther north, it almost seems to get a bit warmer until the stone we’ve been walking on starts yielding to grass. That doesn’t seem right. My water skin is still half-frozen on my hip, so it can’t actually be getting warmer.

_“—to try to get into the spirit world—”_

“Did you say something?” I ask, stopping dead in the middle of the path. There’s no one else around us on the road.

Nanuq shakes his head. “No one said anything, why?”

“Thought I heard a voice. It was saying something about the spirit world. Neither of you heard that? It was right by my ear.”

Both of them look at me like I’ve grown another head. I know I heard someone talking, I know it. I’m not crazy. But as we start walking again, a few more snippets come through on the wind that picks up every now and then. “Nanuq, if you’re doing that voice behind me I’ll hit you on the head, I swear.”

“I’m not doing any voice, Kyoshi. And why do you assume it’s me?”

“Yun can’t pull off a man’s voice. She tried one time at the Southern Air Temple, it was all squeaky.”

“I think Nanuq means that it might actually be in your head,” she says. “You know, an Avatar thing? There’s nothing out here but the wind, and we’re really close to the spirit oasis. Maybe that’s what’s causing it?”

It does seem to get louder the closer we get to the gate at the end of the road. “They’ve never been very talkative before, and I’ve been to plenty of temples. I saw Yangchen once, when we were dealing with that spirit monster in Shinden, but that’s all.”

“What was she like?” Yun asks.

“She was short. Stroked my cheek. We didn’t talk.”

There’s a whole conversation going on by the time we go through the gate and into the spirit oasis. Someone wants to get into the spirit world, someone else doesn’t think it’s a good idea, there’s not much to follow beyond that. It’s oddly warm in the oasis, more than I would expect given the handful of torches dotting the area, and the grass isn’t frosted over the slightest bit. A small pool is set in front of a thicket of bamboo, in which two big black-and-white fish keep swimming around one another over and over. It’s a bit mesmerizing, watching them.

Off to one side, there’s a little shrine set into the wall of ice around us, but it doesn’t look like anyone’s home. Despite the absence of anyone else, the argument in my head keeps carrying on, and the voices are slowly coming into better focus. A man wants to do something, a woman is trying to dissuade him, what else is new.

“Are you still hearing things?” Yun asks as she kneels down to brush her hands over the grass. “How is it so warm…?”

Covering my ears doesn’t help much, apart from smearing my face paint around the sides. Must be an Avatar thing. I try and sit between the little pool of water and the bamboo, but it’s more like falling, and Nanuq only barely catches me and keeps me from keeling over. “No idea what they’re banging around in my head for, but they’re definitely getting excited about something—ah, fuck! Just get out here already!”

The wind picks up again, gusts blowing out at the slightest twitch of my fingers, and everything goes painfully bright at the edges of my vision. Yun and Nanuq are both bracing themselves against the wind, and it dies away as quickly as it came on while something uncomfortably cold passes through my body. Deep breaths, girl. It’s over, and they’re not using my skull as their forum anymore.

“Uh, Kyoshi?” Nanuq brushes his hair out of his face and wipes some loose grass off his sleeves. “Looks like you found your voice.”

The Water Tribe man sitting in front of the bamboo thicket is shimmering like a trick of the light and looks about as confused as us until his gaze settles on me. He smiles. “I was wondering when we would get around to this. It’s good to finally meet you, Kyoshi.”

I’ve never seen this man before in my life, but I can’t deny knowing him. “Avatar Kuruk.”


	40. Avatar Kuruk

“The face paint’s a bit excessive, don’t you think?”

“Pretty bold talk coming from a guy wearing a polar bear dog pelt on his head. Now why are you having it out in my mind with one of the others?” I ask. “And why are you getting all chatty now? I could’ve used you when I was huddled in my lean-to in a blizzard, or when my brothers were using me as an earthbending target, or…ugh, never mind.”

Kuruk gestures to the oasis around us. “I spent a lot of time here, I suppose you trudged it up. I also had quite a few arguments with some of my predecessors about using it to get into the spirit world. Yangchen was very, ah, involved in my life.”

“She spent more than sixty years keeping the world from falling out of balance, it’s hardly surprising that she’d want to see that it stayed peaceful,” Yun says as she sits down beside me. “And it worked, there hasn’t been another Fire Nation civil war since the one she stopped.”

_Do we get to hear about all the adventures Kuruk told you about?_

_No, we were spared his list of conquests. Mostly. I thought I told you not to interrupt, Korra._

“Is this you?” Nanuq asks as he pokes at Kuruk’s arm. The fabric of his coat wrinkles, and I feel the prodding on my own shoulder. “The real you, I mean. Or is it the Avatar spirit?”

He brushes Nanuq away. “I don’t think I would know if I was one or the other. But as long as you’re here, I hope you can help me, Avatar Kyoshi. I have some unfinished business.”

I knew it, I _knew_ someone was going to try and wheedle some help out of me. Granted, I didn’t think it was going to be the last Avatar, but I knew it was going to be someone. “Could it possibly wait a bit? We only came here to see the oasis, and we have our own mess of issues to deal with right now. His brother got betrothed, your old tribe seems bent on absorbing all the others…Avatar stuff is a bit low on my list of priorities right now.”

“Kyoshi, this is probably important,” Yun says as she twiddles one of the beads of her pendant, but then in a lower voice she adds, “and even if it isn’t, it’s not like you can get away from him…”

“I can hear you,” Kuruk says flatly.

Yun laughs nervously, pulls up the hood on her coat, and tries to shrink behind me. She’s right, unfortunately. It’d be difficult to get away from someone who essentially lives in my head. “All right, tell us what it is, I’ll see if I can do anything about it while I’m keeping the peace with the Water Tribes.”

“I was betrothed for a time, but an ancient spirit named Koh stole my bride’s face on the day of our wedding—”

“There’ve been a _lot_ of songs about this, trust me,” I say. He bristles a bit when I cut him off. “The woman whose beauty tamed the wild sea, all the comparisons between her and the moon, and Koh stole her face and pulled her into the spirit world to punish you for your pride and arrogance. What is it that you need?”

He looks a little put out at not being able to tell the story, but I really don’t want to get stuck here with him. I’d rather figure out how to manifest Yangchen or Michiko or _anyone_ else. “Yes, well…every year, on what would have been our anniversary, I would go into the spirit world to try and save her. I usually returned to this oasis, but sometimes I tried other places. I never succeeded, and I was killed at the Eastern Air Temple before I could try that year.”

Yun tilts her head at his phrasing—I’ve never heard of him being _killed_ at the temple, only dying—but she doesn’t press him. “I thought you might have better fortune,” he says.

Another traipse through the spirit world, because my last one was so successful, for a nebulous goal against an ancient, powerful face-stealing spirit. The next time I want to look at a temple, an oasis or anything of the sort, I’m going to remember this. “Please,” he says, his voice echoing in my head. “Ummi doesn’t deserve being strung between life and death forever. Not for my mistakes.”

“Even if I knew how to help, I can’t get into the spirit world on my own. I’m a natural earthbender, we don’t take well to meditating.”

Kuruk gets up and walks around us, hovering slightly over the water of the pool in the middle of the oasis, and points down. “You can, with the right focus.”

Those fish are still circling one another, locked in an endless push and pull. Neither of them can be natural, not with that coloration. One’s all black but for a big white spot on top of its head, and the other is just the opposite. Spirits? What are they doing in our world—

Everything’s hot and muggy all of a sudden. I look around, but the oasis is now a swamp, and the pool of water is only a little shallow in between some large tree roots. The air is thick with fog, and I’m already sweating uncomfortably in nothing but my kimono.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake…”

“Wow, you’re a natural,” Kuruk says. Disorienting as it is to see him in the water below me instead of my own reflection, I still manage to look annoyed. “I knew you could do it!”

“I’m guessing your idea of consent was fairly flexible,” I mutter. “You didn’t drag Yun and Nanuq in here too, did you?”

“They’re still in the oasis, watching over your body.” Well, they’d better not do anything to it while I’m not there to enjoy it. “Now, Koh is an ancient spirit who steals the faces of any living thing that shows any emotion at all.”

Should’ve brought Rei, but I’ll have to do. I calm myself down and drop into the role I used to play for the fights, the garish blank that the other fighters could rail against. It’s surprisingly easy to slip back into form, even now that I have things to be happy about or annoyed with. Like pushy past lives. “I can handle that. But if you tried to do this every year and failed, what makes you think I’ll fare any better? Do you expect Koh to give her face back if I ask nicely?”

“You are _not_ dragging her into this, Kuruk.”

And now there’s another reflection in the water. We really should have brought Rei. Avatar Yangchen, an angry little barely-five-feet-tall nun, is glowering at Kuruk’s reflection. “She’s willing to try!” he says, but Yangchen isn’t having any of it. “I need her help with this!”

“Do we need to have another conversation about what a ‘willing’ woman looks like?” Yangchen asks. “She has the welfare of the whole world to think about, not your grudge with a spirit even older than us. This fight killed you, are you really going to be so quick to try and send her on your fool’s errand?”

I bump the water with my boot and make them ripple to get their attention. “All right, hold on. Now I see why Rei has such a thing for you…”

They both stop their arguing, and Yangchen’s cheeks flush red as she shoots Kuruk a sidelong scowl. “Look, I’m already here and I need some precedent for if I have to ask the next Avatar to fix my fuckups. No promises, but I can at least try. So where is this Koh, anyway?”

“You don’t need to do this,” Yangchen says. “It killed him, and he was a fully realized Avatar.”

Kuruk huffs. “Getting blasted out of a tower at the Eastern Air Temple is what killed me, not going into the spirit world. You should know.”

That earns him another foul look from his predecessor. I can’t imagine what these two were alike when he was alive. “Well, I really want to hear more about that, but for now I’m going to see about finding Koh. Can you two keep the fighting to a low roar for the moment?”

“We’ll do our best,” Yangchen says, and the water shimmers until it’s only my reflection looking back at me. They bicker like he’s her petulant son, honestly. Now why is the part of the spirit world around the Northern Water Tribe a swamp…well. The muddy water squelches under my boots as I start for a stretch of arguably dry land in the distance. If I were an ancient, face-stealing spirit, where would I hide?

“Any directions, Kuruk?”

Something tugs gently in my chest to the right, and it grows more insistent the further I trek into the muck. If I had the power to bend the world to my will—more than I already do, that is—I’m not sure I’d go and make a swamp, but the spirits I see out of the corner of my eye seem content enough. A little standoffish, running away as soon as they catch sight of me, but content.

The little twinge in my chest turns into an ache as I approach an enormous gnarled tree whose roots don’t seem particularly bothered by the lack of soil around them. The lack of leaves and discernable sunlight don’t seem to be a problem, either. A great big hole in the middle of the trunk is too dark to see inside, but I’m more interested in the young woman in Water Tribe garb sitting with her back to me in front of an especially large puddle nearby. It can’t be this easy, can it? I take a few steps toward her, and she bristles, but doesn’t turn around. “Ummi?”

She throws her hands over her face and hunches over, trying to turn further away from me. I get up beside her, and she keeps twisting to keep her back to me. Kuruk’s reflection replaces mine in the puddle, arms out toward her reflection, always out of reach. “Don’t tell me you’re just stuck in here—”

I put my hand on her shoulder and she finally turns back, only for me to see that she really doesn’t have a face. I really hope that I can’t throw up in the spirit world. There’re no bumps where the nose and mouth should be, no slight hollows for the eyes. It’s simply nothingness, from her chin to her hairline. I go to pull my hand away but she grabs it before I can step back, and I let her study my palm. Her head tilts to the side after a moment.

“Not the Avatar you were expecting, I guess…I’m the next one. Kyoshi. Kuruk died almost twenty years ago.”

Her shoulders slump as she nods slowly. This is monstrous, leaving her conscious like this. Ummi puts one hand where her face would be and makes a motion like she’s feeling around it, then points to me. I take her hand and put it on my cheek, where she can study my face. It must be a stark change, I don’t look anything like her betrothed. She motions to her lack of face again and then points to the twisted old tree.

“Yeah, that’s what I’m here for. My life’s been a little more humble than Kuruk’s, maybe I’ll have better luck.”

I leave her by the water and head for Koh’s lair. By some quirk of the spirit world, the inside of the tree is very obviously larger than the outside, which drives the builder in me crazy. I can’t express it, though. My face might be scarred and burned and generally all kinds of fucked up, but it’s mine, and I’m not letting some spirit make off with it.

Whatever’s making that chittering sound in the shadows isn’t helping me keep a blank expression. Like little metal points tapping on my ear, slightly below the threshold of ‘annoying’ on their own but far above it in their cadence.

My panic, thankfully, stays confined to a painful thump in my heart when the biggest centipede I’ve ever seen swings down from the shadows overhead. The fact that it’s easily twenty feet long, though, is only the second-most disturbing thing, losing out to the eerie, wax-like Earth Kingdom man’s face where its mouth should be. Guess I found the thief.

“Usually a grudge dies with its holder, Avatar,” Koh says with a voice like pins pricking at the skin.

“Guess we can dispense with the introductions.”

“Oh, but why would we do that?” The rest of Koh’s body drifts down to the floor, skittering about before his pincers go swiping by my face, so close that I can feel the air whisper as he disturbs it, trying to get a rise out of me. “I never miss the chance to learn a new name, a new…face.”

“I’m sure you don’t. All I need is Ummi’s face and I’ll be out of your way, then you can get back to crawling around or whatever it is you do in your lovely home here,” I say.

Something that looks uncomfortably like an eyelid suddenly slides over his face, and then there’s another one there, the one I assume is Ummi’s. Very pretty. “Someone shared the wrong account with you, Avatar. They call me Koh the Face _Stealer_ , not the Face _Giver_. Why would I part with such a lovely piece of my collection?”

Kuruk is yelling uselessly somewhere in my mind. “Because I’m asking nicely, and because Kuruk’s long dead. There’s no reason to keep her strung between life and death if this was to punish him. And as annoying as it must have been to have him try and kill you every year, I have to live with him in my head all the time.”

“On that score I do sympathize,” Koh says, suspending his tail over his face and swinging it back and forth to try and draw my attention. He might have rules about when he can steal a face, but it seems he’s not opposed to stacking the deck. “But asking nicely? You must be a very different kind of Avatar, either very polite or very foolish. He would come charging in, stony-faced as you please, armed with a great big Water Tribe axe as if it would do anything. Begged, borrowed and stole for anything he thought would give him an edge, even traded a bit of his mortality to another spirit for information on how to defeat me. Not that it helped him, once he found out what would happen to his precious Ummi even if he managed to get her face back. I wonder, why the change of heart…?”

He turns away, twisting over himself as if to ruminate on it. “Being dead must’ve calmed him down,” I say.

“Hmm. Obviously you have no stake in this, and she looks so pathetic sometimes, sitting there by the water. It really makes the place rather gloomy. I do hate to give away a face without taking one in return, it makes others think they can flout the rules, but you getting rid of her would almost be doing me a favor.”

“Oh, great!”

I grin—mistake—and Koh whips around, pincers out. They latch on around my face, heedless of my attempts to pull back or force them away, and then slowly draw back with an awful sucking sound. My heart is going mad, Yangchen is turning out a certain waterbender somewhere in my head, and all my new burns cry out in protest as my skin gets handled. Fucking, fuck, fuck Kuruk for pulling me into this—

But I don’t go blind, my mouth doesn’t seal up, and I can still smell everything the swamp has to offer. Did he get…I bite my tongue to deaden my expression and watch as the pincers pull away with my face paint stretched between them. It’s really that integral to how I see myself? Well, I’m not going to look a gift beetle horse in the mouth.

“What is this?” he asks in a lower voice, creaking like knives running across erhu strings.

“It’s a face,” I say, with a level of calmness out of all proportion with how my heart is pounding. “The one that goes along with the name Kyoshi. Just an artifice. A part I play, a character made up by a grumpy old earthbender to sell tickets. It’s yours, keep it. Now you’re not breaking your rules if you give me that one.”

Koh’s pincers bristle as he inspects the face paint, stretching it in spots, poking one pincer through the gaps where my mouth and eyes were. He bares Ummi’s teeth. “You tricked me.”

Probably best not to mention that I had no idea that would happen. “It must feel terrible, being on the other side of that for once.”

The not-quite-eyelids around his face reach out— _I can be disgusted later, hold it together for now_ —and grab the face paint, pulling it into the iris where his face rests. It closes for a moment, and when it opens next he’s twisted it into a stark woman’s Noh mask. How unpleasantly appropriate. “It looks good on you.”

“You’re as good at lying as Kuruk was at fighting,” Koh says dryly. He twists himself around and starts climbing back up on the inside of his tree. “Please don’t mistake that for a compliment. Why are you doing this, Avatar Kyoshi, or whatever your name is? Kuruk was fond of fighting spirits, you know. After all the other humans got tired of dealing with him. Someone had to get beaten to impress whoever had caught his fancy that week. You’re really going to reward a person like that? Someone who flouted his role as the bridge between your world and mine?”

“Not really doing it for him.”

He swoops down again to try and get something out of my actual face. When I don’t give him anything, he rolls his eyes and clicks a few of his pincers together. “Oh, very well. Aren’t you the interesting sort, Kyoshi.”

 _Kyoshi_. A made-up name for a made-up face. Something spins between Koh’s pincers like spider’s silk, glowing softly with its own light, before it coalesces into a small orb. I hold my hands out, and he passes it to me, though not without one more garish expression to make me jump out of my skin. Sorry Koh, but I’m out of spare faces. “Don’t presume to impose on my generosity and believe that I’ll do this again,” he says. “Now, if there’s nothing else…”

No one’s imposing on some nonexistent generosity, and I’m not looking for a reason to stick around. I bow slightly and head out of the tree not a moment too soon.

Ummi is still sitting by the puddle where I left her, running her fingers on the surface of the shallow water. She stiffens again at my approach, but she doesn’t turn away. My reflection isn’t even there in the water, replaced already by Kuruk’s. “I’ve got something that belongs to you.”

She gets to her feet, holding out a tentative hand to feel for my arm, and then waits expectantly. “I’m not exactly sure what to do here, so—ah, was that it?”

The little orb comes hovering out of my hand and up to her…well, not her _face_ , but the spot where her face should be, before touching the skin there. All the light becomes too much for a few seconds, forcing my gaze away, and when I’m able to turn back she has her face again. She’s very pretty, I’ll grant Kuruk that much. Ummi blinks a few times to try and adjust to having eyes again before settling on me, the almost-seven-foot mess of scars and burns that her betrothed reincarnated into.

Her relief is short-lived. Just as her features settle, cracks starting at her temples begin snaking across her skin, all across her head and down her neck. I wonder if it’s a relief for her, knowing what’s happening after being stuck here for so long. _Thank you_ , she mouths, her big brown eyes staring up at me, and stumbles under her own weight into the puddle beside us. She doesn’t even make a splash as she slips under the water. A soft ache in my chest becomes a pang until I can steady myself. Morbid curiosity, doubtless, but I have to know, and I kneel down to test the puddle’s depth. I can get about a third of my finger below the surface before I hit the bottom.  Spirit world geometry…I sit down in her place and wait for Kuruk’s reflection to take notice of me. I’m very tired, all of a sudden. “I did what you wanted. Take me back. And now you owe me a few answers.”

The fog around me gets thicker and thicker, and the unpleasant sensation of falling overtakes me in short order. All at once a slight chill hits, and I know that I’m back. Yun is sitting beside Nanuq with her head on his shoulder, but they both scramble to attention when I open my eyes. Kuruk’s back as well, sitting over the little pond and staring off wistfully into space. Two half-hug, half-tackles come at my side before I have a chance to ask him anything.

“What happened?” Nanuq asks, his voice muffled slightly from my coat. “Your eyes started glowing and then we couldn’t get any response from you. Don’t just go jumping into the spirit world like that!”

“Hey, I was tricked. I’m sure there are plenty of women who can say that about Kuruk…as far as what happened, I, uh, may have killed a woman. But it’s fine.”

Both of them pull back a bit and give me incredulous looks. I shrug and nod toward my predecessor. “He asked me to. And it was a mercy, believe me. But fighting spirits? Really?” I ask. It would explain the occasional dreams.

“I won’t pretend that I was an excellent Avatar, or even a good one,” Kuruk says. “I inherited half a century of hard-won balance and a world that wouldn’t breathe without the Avatar’s permission. It was easy to lose…perspective.”

“You can’t blame my aunt for the way you acted,” Yun says sharply, rolling one of the beads of her pendant between her fingers.

“And I don’t. She blamed me—she never stopped blaming me, I rarely had a week where she wasn’t trying to tell me what to do or describe the mistakes I was making—but I’m not blaming her. I was the one who liked to show off to everyone around me. Challenging spirits was a mistake, it was what cost me Ummi in the first place.”

“That isn’t why it was a mistake! Attacking spirits in the first place was wrong, not only because it got her stolen!”

Yun’s leaning forward, steadying herself by putting her hands in the grass, and Kuruk only frowns and nods. “I’m sorry, but I have no idea how my mother was able to stand you,” she says.

He looks a bit more closely at her before his gaze slowly tracks down to her pendant. Yun grimaces and folds her arms over her chest before realizing what he’s looking at, and then holds it up. “It was Yangchen’s. My mom gave it to me.”

“Who was your mother, exactly?” Kuruk asks.

“Your attendant at the Azuma Temple. Tian.”

If he wasn’t a spirit, I’m certain his stumbling would’ve sent him right into the pond. He levels an accusatory finger at Yun with an expression very much at odds with the contrition he’d been wearing until now. “What?” Yun asks.

“Your mother killed me!”

Eyebrows go up and scoffs are scoffed, but Yun doesn’t make any attempt to repudiate his claim. “I thought you broke your neck,” Nanuq says.

“B-because her mother blasted me through a window!” Kuruk sputters.

This all seems a bit silly to me. “Look, I’ve met Tian and she’s a piece of work, but murder? She’s a nun. A tongue lashing, sure, but why would she send you through a window?”

He doesn’t seem inclined to answer, but Nanuq stiffens up at my side for some reason. “Kyoshi, how much older are you than Yun?” he asks, slowly.

I have to count for a moment. “Eight months or so, I think.”

“And Yun, your mother never told you who your father was?”

Her brow furrows. “No…why bring that up?”

Nanuq turns back to our spirit interloper without answering. “And something tells me that losing your betrothed didn’t exactly make you celibate,” he says.

Kuruk shakes his head. “It’s easy to seek comfort in old habits.”

“So something made Yun’s mother angry enough to kill you eight months before she was born. You were at the Eastern Air Temple to try and get into the spirit world to save your betrothed, and Tian would’ve already been pregnant for about a month by that point…she told you, and you still went off to try and save another woman. That’d make any woman mad, if a man couldn’t care less that he got her with child.”

Oh. Oh, fuck. Yun’s eyes widen as she looks at me, then at Kuruk—at her father—and starts to tremble.


	41. International Diplomacy

Well, shit.

Yun’s rocking back and forth, holding her head in her hands. My first instinct is to reach out and comfort her, but I’m not sure how well that’d go over at the moment, given this unpleasant little revelation. Fortunately, Nanuq fills in for me without missing a beat, planting himself beside her to provide some support. She slumps against him and into his hug, completely unaware of the tears rolling down her face. Kuruk’s attendant, indeed…if we ever have a reason to go to the Eastern Air Temple, I don’t doubt there’s going to be a long, loud conversation between the abbess and her daughter.

“It’s Yun, right?”

She looks up, bumping into Nanuq’s chin as she does, to where Kuruk is sitting. He’s edged a little closer so that he’s not sitting over the pond anymore, but rather the ground in front of it. That gets a short nod out of her. “That’s a pretty name,” Kuruk says.

“It means _cloud_ in Tochi.” Her voice is painfully dull, as is the humorless laugh that follows. “Air, water—I guess I know why my mom picked it now.”

“Was she a good mother, at least?”

“No, not especially. She shaved my head and banished me because I…I prefer the company of women.”

“Oh.” Kuruk shifts himself over a bit more, closer to her, and I guess he takes it as a good sign when she doesn’t pull away. I can feel the tinges of regret coursing through him, the pangs of sympathy. “I’m sorry.”

“This was one of the only things I ever wanted to know, who my father was,” Yun says quietly. She taps on Nanuq’s arm, and he lets her out of his embrace. The tears are still coming, but she ignores them, apart from the choppy way they’re making her speak. “I thought I could at least go back to Azuma at some point and ask around. The chance was always there, I figured he was someone in the town she fell out with. It’s not like I look half-Water Tribe, I thought I was all Air Nomad. But if my mother didn’t kill you, Kyoshi wouldn’t be the Avatar and I never would’ve met her. There was no way to have you both.”

It’s a cold kind of logic, but she’s not wrong. If Kuruk lived even a few seconds longer, I’d probably be just another earthbender, putting up houses and fighting in that pit in Seizhon until my body gave out. No Avatar, no other bending, no reason to get anywhere near an air temple. And Yun might not ever have gone to the Southern Air Temple either, if she had the option of going to her father when her mother put her out. It was utter chance that we ever crossed paths in the first place.

Kuruk nods. “If it’s any consolation, I think you came out ahead as far as that goes,” he says. “I wasn’t a very good father.”

“That’s really not as comforting as you might think.” Yun looks down as she wrings her hands, then takes a deep breath and holds her head high. “Dad.”

That gets a smile out of him.

“I’m glad at least one Avatar got to be a part of your life. Thank you again, Kyoshi. For everything. Yun—”

She lunges forward before he can fade away and throws herself into an embrace, one she has returned after a moment. I can feel the pressure of her arms around my own body, the warmth of her cheek in the crook of my neck. “Don’t vanish for twenty years again,” she mumbles, shuddering against him.

I get the sense that he’s not used to having women so close without a romantic context, because the way he pats her on the head is exceedingly awkward. “You only have to have Kyoshi draw me out, little cloud.”

Way to put it all on me, Kuruk. Yun gets in one last squeeze before he vanishes, and then she’s left to try and not fall forward into the pool. She corrects with a puff of air to counterbalance, then sits quietly for a moment, flicking her hands through the grass. When I shuffle closer, I can see fresh tears rolling down her face, but they hit a smile rather than a wavering frown. “Yun?”

“I’d thought about asking you some time, when people didn’t constantly need helping, if we could go back to Azuma to try and find my father,” she says, staring down at the fish in the pond. “Nothing urgent, it wouldn’t have been the end of the world if I never found out…but it always bothered me, the way Tian would cut me off whenever I tried to ask. I thought she might’ve been embarrassed or ashamed, not that she killed him and that I’ve been with his reincarnation for a year and a half.”

“In fairness, how often does that really happen?” I ask, and Yun chuckles. “Seriously, are you all right? That must have been a lot to process.”

“This isn’t what I expected when we woke up this morning, but it’s always an adventure with you, isn’t it? And now I guess I’m in my homeland now, sort of.” She turns one palm over and rubs at the very fair skin with her thumb. “I hope my being half-Northern Water Tribe doesn’t make you think any differently of me, Nanuq.”

He sits on her other side and playfully nudges her shoulder. “Don’t worry, I won’t hold it against you. But if I’m being completely honest, you really don’t look it.”

Compared to us, Yun is downright pale. She pushes him back and looks up at the darkened sky, but it doesn’t seem to tell her what she wants to know. “How long have we been here?”

“About an hour or so,” Nanuq says. “And I was sitting the whole time Kyoshi was in the spirit world, so I’m a little sore. Should we head back?”

Better we don’t give Rei any reason to worry. The place looks fine for an accession ceremony, which was the whole purpose of coming here in the first place, so we pick ourselves up, shake the numbness out of our legs, and head back the way we came. “Oh, wait, there was something I needed here.”

Nanuq turns on his heel when we get to the oasis entrance and goes back to the little pond in the middle, popping the cap on his water skin and kneeling in the grass. He pours his own water onto the ground, shaking out the last few drops, then bows twice and draws up water from the pond instead. It almost seems to shimmer in the light of the torches around us, more so than the stuff we flew over all the way here. “Spirit oasis water is supposed to be especially pure. I want to see if it can do anything for Rei’s burns,” he says when he rejoins us.

“They won’t mind you taking that?” Yun asks.

“Um…they won’t _know_ I’m taking it.” Nanuq caps his water skin and slings it securely over his hip. “It’s spirit stuff, the pond will refill. And besides, it’s for a good cause. Fostering cooperation and understanding between the Fire Nation and the Water Tribes.”

“Oh, relax, you don’t need to justify it,” I say, flicking one of his little braids. “Besides, I’m the bridge to the spirit world, and I say it’s fine. Maybe if Rei’s burns don’t bother her she’ll be up for actually cuddling.”

Yun groans.

It’s still dark when we emerge out onto the city streets—that’ll take some getting used to—but it seems calmer, less bustling. My sense of time is snarled up from the sky and my spirit world diversion, I don’t know if there’s some consensus about what constitutes _evening_ in the dark months or everyone’s just gone somewhere else. Either way, it’s nice to walk back all but unnoticed, no odd looks for my height or our clothes.

“At the risk of picking at this wound,” Yun says, “do you think this is somewhere you might be able to learn more waterbending? Both of you, really.”

That’s a decent question. I’m not a master waterbender by any stretch of the imagination, and I don’t think Nanuq is, either. If there’s anywhere we could both pick up something new, it’d be here. My own style tends to be sweeping and circular, like the way Yun taught me airbending, but I’ve never picked up the subtler motions that Nanuq uses. If nothing else, it would be good to get exposure to some new techniques. If our Tayagun prince doesn’t mind learning from Shui benders, that is.

“I could stand to pick up some new combat forms,” he says after a moment of careful deliberation. “It’s bound to be a different style, developing on the other side of the world and all. But you probably don’t want to sit around and watch us waterbend, Yun.”

“Hmm.” She fusses with her pendant, twirling the beads between her fingers and flicking at the worn red tassels. “It _is_ fun to watch Kyoshi bend. But I was thinking of seeing if Avatar Kuruk’s family is still around.”

Certainly couldn’t hurt to have some family that doesn’t disdain her. I ruffle her hair, and she gently bumps my side. “That all sounds fine, the chief can probably point us in the right direction,” I say. “But…tomorrow. Popping into the spirit world really took it out of me.”

“What did you actually do in there?” Yun asks.

I touch my cheek and rub the tips of my glove against my skin, only to find bone-white paint on the fabric. It had felt so visceral when that spirit pulled it off, as if it really was my face. There’s certainly an argument to make that it is. I bend it back into place. “Kyoshi?”

Kyoshi. A borrowed name for a borrowed face. The first thing that came to mind for an angry, tired woman latching onto a scrap of kindness in a strange place. But that’s me now, a role I’ve lived for so long that it doesn’t matter anymore where Kyoshi ends and the rest of me begins. We work well together like that. And throwing a history I don’t want on people I love, only to ask them to look past it, isn’t fair to them. Maybe one day. But not today, not when I’m exhausted and there’s an inter-tribal betrothal to deal with.

“I, uh…had to keep a straight face for a spirit. That didn’t work out, and it took my paint,” I say as we cross a bridge back to the royal district.

“You have it all the time in the spirit world?” Nanuq asks.

“Well, not now I don’t, but better that than my face. What matters is that I did it and now Kuruk won’t bug me for help anymore. Well, not with that. Come on, maybe it’s around a meal time back at the palace. Then we can see how well those beds hold heat.”

Something goes right today, and we come back as people are being called to dinner in a large room off the receiving hall. As guests, we’re given seats near the front of the table, a heavy slab of wood supported by whalebone legs, along with Anyu, Sanara and Tiaraq. What good mood we managed to coax out of Nanuq falls foul somewhat at seeing them sitting together, but I give his ass a good squeeze before we sit down and that at least distracts him.

“Did you enjoy yourselves?” Rei asks as she takes up a seat to my left. “Any excitement in my absence?”

“You won’t believe what I learned to do,” I say with a grin.

“I am already deeply concerned.”

Exhaustion notwithstanding, dinner—I think it’s dinner, that’s how it feels—is a pleasant enough affair after all the toasts and acknowledgements. There’s much to be made of my choice of locale for my accession, as well as my attendance of the crown princess’s wedding. Nanuq keeps watching his elder brother when the idle conversations turn to wedding plans, chewing some surprisingly tough stewed sea prunes as Sanara speaks with her father.

“I’m so glad you’ll be at our wedding, all of you,” she says, flicking one finger through Tiaraq’s beard. “Prince Nanuq, there’ll be quite a few pretty young ladies there, if you’re so inclined…”

His smile is so strained I worry it might crack his cheeks. “Thank you, Your Highness. But I’m spoken for.”

Just to bring his point home, I thread my fingers through his hair and nudge our seats closer. Sanara nods. “Of course, of course.”

“Chief Anyu,” I say, in what has to be a painfully obvious attempt to change the subject, “Nanuq and I were hoping to take in some of the local bending style while we’re here. Is there anywhere you might recommend for that? A school or a master, perhaps?”

He scratches at his chin, which is currently playing host to a few drops of broth from his sea prune stew. “I think I could find a few names for you, they’d probably start lessons in the morning.”

So this _is_ dinner. Yun clears her throat and leans forward to try and make herself look a bit bigger. “If you also happened to know if any of Avatar Kuruk’s family is still in the tribe, I would appreciate the information.”

“About his parents and siblings, or his children?” Anyu asks. “The latter list is quite a bit longer than the former.”

Rei snickers until I flick a puff of air into the side of her face. “What was that for?”

“Let’s just say we finally found out who Yun’s father was,” I mumble.

“Oh…”

Yun smiles good-naturedly. “Anything you have would be lovely, thank you.”

Not to be out of focus, Sanara quickly returns to talk of nuptials, and I can see Tiaraq and Anyu sigh at the same time, unnoticed by her. I can almost respect her focus.

Yun and Nanuq peel off into their own conversation, Rei lapses into silence to examine the rest of the people around the table, the various officials and people whose titles I didn’t pay attention to when I was introduced to them, and eventually even Sanara exhausts herself with talk of seating arrangements and what musicians she plans to have. As if to encourage her to do something else but talk of weddings, Tiaraq kisses her hand once she wears herself out. Nanuq stiffens slightly in his chair, but otherwise pays it no mind.

“Avatar Kyoshi, could I show you something?” Sanara asks. “It’s up on one of the balconies.”

I can’t imagine balconies made of ice in a palace made also of ice are very stable, but that might be residual worry about politicians trying to kill me. “Oh, sure. Lead the way.”

Tiaraq slumps in his seat when she gets up, relieved to be spared more wedding talk now that Sanara’s gotten her second wind, but then remembers Nanuq across the table and pointedly looks away from his younger brother. Yun’s still working on her stewed sea prunes, so I let them both be and follow the crown princess through the high, icy halls of the palace. For all the talk of differences between the Shui and Tayagun, she doesn’t seem all that different from how I imagine Nanuq and Tiaraq’s sisters would look. The same dark brown skin, blue eyes, brown hair…her cheeks sit a little higher on her face, if I’m desperate for a detail. Other than that, the greatest differences I can see are the symbols of her office, the fanciful hairpiece and finely-trimmed clothes. But if Nanuq says there are differences, then I’m going to believe him unless I get a good reason not to.

“My apologies for earlier, I didn’t realize you and Prince Nanuq were together,” she says, wringing her hands. “Are you married?”

“Oh no, nothing like that. We’re—we’re each other’s consorts, I guess. That’s the best way I can describe it.”

She nods and turns down another hallway. A marriage would make it official, but as things stand I suppose I’m a princess consort of the Tayagun, in a way. Quite the lofty title. Does that make him my consort, too? Do Avatars get consorts? We should.

Up a few flights of stairs which have been wisely covered in furs is another, smaller hallway that has an awful draft. Sanara leads me to a heavy wooden door that takes some pushing to get open, and on the other side is a semicircular balcony that looks out over the courtyard in front of the palace and the tribe beyond.

“This platform’s fixed to the rest of the building with something besides ice, right?” I ask.

“There it is! Look up!”

Most of the stars in the blackened sky are washed out by light from the tribe, but farther south, closer to the twilight on the horizon, is a bright, lustrous band of green weaving through the night. It ripples and shimmers, stretching from one end of the sky to the other as the edges fade into the darkness around it.

“Wow…”

“They call it the aurora,” Sanara says. “Some nights I’ll come up here and watch it for hours. The sages say it’s the hem of the moon spirit’s robes as she dances in the sky for her husband, the ocean spirit. It isn’t something you can see in the Earth Kingdom, and as the bridge between the worlds I thought you might enjoy it. I’ve been told they can see it during the dark months in the Southern Water Tribe, too.”

Right, the tribes. I shake my head clear and force myself to look away. “Speaking of, we were somewhat surprised to hear about your betrothal. I met Prince Tiaraq some months ago, and it seemed like he was only making a diplomatic trip here. We didn’t get the impression that the nobility of the different tribes intermarried very often.”

“We usually don’t,” she says, her cheeks flushing in the cold. “But he was so charming at the solstice festival, and refreshingly forward. Well, we rather had to get married after that night, really.”

“Ah—you’re with child?” I’d be much less inclined to go along with Nanuq’s schemes to break their betrothal if that’s the case.

“Oh no, no.” Sanara smiles and puts a hand on her abdomen. “Though not for lack of trying…”

That’s more than I needed to hear. “The aurora is lovely, Your Highness, but my friends and I had a long day of traveling, we were going to settle in for the night soon.”

She nods, gives me directions back to the main hall, and tucks her hands into her sleeves as she looks up at the sky again. The way she puts it, she really is simply fond of Tiaraq, though his recount of the solstice festival is slightly different. Maybe he was just trying to save face in front of Nanuq? Maybe she’s delusional? There’s time to figure it out.

Yun and Nanuq are still in the dining hall with the chief, though most of the others have left already, including Rei and Tiaraq. “I got the name of a waterbending master who runs an academy near the southern shore,” Nanuq says.

“And I have an address for some of Kuruk’s family.”

“Sounds like we’ll be busy, then. Where’d Rei get to?”

Yun shrugs. “She left about ten minutes ago, I guess she went back to her room.”

I’m fighting back yawns by the time we get to the guest wing, and those sea prunes settle heavy in the stomach. “You two can head in, I’ll just tell Rei that she has to find something to do while we’re out tomorrow.”

Her door’s stuck—that’s what happens when the frames are made of _ice_ , whatever architect did this should be ashamed—and takes a stiff shoulder to finally open. Rei’s inside like Yun had guess, paying me no mind as she climbs into Tiaraq’s lap and pulls him into a deep, bruising kiss.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Despite the timing of this post (happy Mother's Day!), my mother very definitely did not kill my father who then reincarnated into my tall girlfriend. Yun's mom is just messed up.
> 
> My working title for this chapter was "Water Tribe Guys with Commitment Issues." _Had_ Sanara been pregnant, it would've been "Crappy Water Tribe Fathers."


	42. Fire and Ice

_“Rei!”_

They both finally noticed I was in the doorway and pushed away from one another, as if doing so would make me forget what I’d seen. Rei cleared her throat, rasping loudly, and Tiaraq merely stared at the ground. Yun and Nanuq came stumbling out of our room at my outburst, already in their nightclothes and clearly unhappy about having left the warmth of the bed. “Why are you yelling, what’s going…on…?” Nanuq started to ask, until he saw the way his brother’s robes were pulled open at the collar.

“I’m looking forward to hearing that, too,” I said as all three of us drifted into Rei’s quarters, drawn by the warmth she was throwing off. Some of the less concentrated ice around her room was already weeping little rivulets of water, and the way her face flushed red I wouldn’t have been surprised if she melted right through the floor before the night was out. She frowned, stood up from her bed, and folded her arms under her chest.

“I do not recall ever needing to justify my private life to you, Kyoshi.”

“You’ve also never done something so stupid. And you,” I said, turning to Tiaraq, “you’re betrothed. It was all the crown princess would talk about all through dinner.”

He shrank under my gaze, but Rei remained haughtily defiant, staring right back when I glowered at her.

“What are you arguing about?” Yun asked. “And that aside, why _are_ you here, Tiaraq?”

I glanced out into the hall to make sure to one had been assigned to keep us under watch, then shut the door and pointed vaguely in their direction. “His tongue was halfway down her throat when I came in to tell Rei our plans for our free time.”

Nanuq’s eyes widened and he rounded on his brother. “What—what are you doing? You give me this big speech earlier about trying to get our tribe in their good graces with a marriage to the princess, and now you’re cuckolding her? Are you just bound to make stupid decisions if I’m not nearby?”

“You’re _my_ younger brother, Nanuq. Not the other way around. Don’t let the fact that you’re taller go to your head.”

“Then tell me what the fuck you’re thinking!”

I wasn’t sure I’d ever heard him swear. Tiaraq stared past his shoulder, but Nanuq jabbed at his arm until their gazes met. “You’ve known her for a day. Less than that, even,” he hissed, with a wave of his hand in Rei’s direction. She wrapped her arms around her sides, and more of the ice in the room seemed to weep.

“You dropped everything to stay with Kyoshi after knowing her for a week,” Tiaraq countered.

He had a point there, if a flimsy one. Nanuq wasn’t having it. “Sanara isn’t the Avatar in need of a waterbending teacher. This was _your_ plan, I’m not letting you abandon it and get our tribe annihilated.”

“That wasn’t what I was trying to do,” Tiaraq said desperately, tapping his open palms against his chest for emphasis. “And there wasn’t a plan, so don’t pin that on me. I had too much to drink and woke up in her bed. Things spun out of control from there, like I told you. I don’t love Sanara.”

“What’s love got to do with it? Mother and Father barely give each other the time of day and they’re married.”

“They’re also miserable,” Tiaraq shot back. Yun clung to my side, and I had to fight not to duck out of the room as they raised their voices. Brothers arguing had never led to anything good for me. “I think I’d at least want to love my wife, wouldn’t you?”

Nanuq looks back at me, only for a moment, but enough that my heart calmed somewhat. “What I want isn’t the issue here.” His voice lowered back to its usual volume, for which I was grateful. “Our mother is the chief of the tribe, we don’t have the luxury of only thinking about ourselves. You fell into this situation, and I’m sorry about that. But you decided to see it through instead of setting Sanara straight, and backing out now, especially like this, would only make things worse for everyone.”

“I know, I know,” Tiaraq muttered, and sank onto a cushion behind him. “We just…started talking when you all left. It was a relief to discuss something other than wedding arrangements for the first time in weeks.”

“Right.” Nanuq turned to Rei, but didn’t step toward her. “Have you ever been to the South Pole, Rei?”

She shook her head. Nanuq rolled his lower lip between his teeth. “Then let me put a picture together for you. Our tribe is small, six hundred people or so in a good year. Barely half of what we’d need to sustain a population. It’s embarrassing how few generations you’d have to go back to see how we’re all related to one another, seven at the most. So most people want to marry outside the tribe, which is fine, new blood is good. But the Air Nomads down there keep to themselves, the people in southern Chikyu don’t exactly want to come live in the snow, so the only other people there we can marry are Shuinan. They’ve got more land, more money, more waterbenders, more everything. So they don’t come to us. When a Tayagun does marry a Shuinan, they leave our tribe and go to theirs. The only reason they don’t stop the pretense and wipe us out is because it would be too costly. But if our prince makes a fool of their crown princess? They won’t care about what it would take.”

Rei tugged at her braid and sighed. “I cannot, will not, apologize for my feelings,” she said, and Nanuq frowned until she continued. “But I…let my passions overrun me. I still need time to accustom myself to feeling them so fully. None of that excuses me putting your tribe in danger, and for _that_ I apologize. If it would not make things worse, I would apologize to Sanara as well. This betrothal, at least, is real to her. Perhaps we should all approach this matter with clearer heads in the morning.”

She bowed deeply, her Fire Nation formality shining through, and Nanuq nodded in return. Tiaraq shuffled out of the room first with a sidelong glance at Rei he must have thought we wouldn’t notice, followed by the three of us. Nanuq took a step after his brother in the hall. “Tiaraq—”

“You’ve already given me my lumps. I’m going to bed.”

We did the same, all of us exhausted after our Kuruk ordeal. Yun crawled under the covers at the first opportunity, while Nanuq stayed sitting on the side of the bed as I changed. Every scrap of exposed skin was blasted with cold air, and I decided then and there to invest in some warmer nightclothes the very next day. With that done, I padded over to Nanuq and stroked his cheek. “Are you going to be all right?” I asked.

“That was a stupid thing he did, that both of them did. I just need some time to be angry tomorrow.”

“Yeah.” I bent down and lightly kissed his lips before nudging him farther up the bed. “Come on, you’re in the middle tonight. You need the cuddling more than I do.”

It didn’t seem to matter who it was, Yun only wanted a warm body to latch onto while she slept, and she had pressed into Nanuq’s back even before I’d finished settling in. She went out quickly, her gentle snoring the only accompaniment to our uneven breathing. I could tell Nanuq was still awake from the low light of the candles across the room, staring contemplatively into my collarbone. Slowly, I tugged the drawstring of his pants loose and reached under them to try and give him something else to focus on, but he only shook his head and rolled his hips away from my hand. “Not really in the mood tonight, sorry,” he breathed against my skin.

“Don’t apologize, I thought maybe you wanted some distraction from all this. Can I do anything for you?”

He shuffled a bit closer, until it was a simple matter for him to intertwine our legs. His arms wrapped around my waist and squeezed. “Hold me?”

Easy enough.

⁂

Our mistake, I thought, was not extracting some kind of acquiescence from them about staying apart from one another.

Sanara, thankfully, had been too wrapped up in talking with her father over breakfast to notice the looks they kept giving each other. We were very much aware the whole time, though. Even without talking, one would glance at the other, whether out of guilt or fondness I wasn’t sure, and turn back to their meal as soon as their gaze was matched. Nanuq did his best to keep Tiaraq occupied, and Yun did the same with Rei while I prodded Sanara to keep talking about her wedding arrangements.

Finally she seemed to have talked herself out and turned her attention to her meal and her betrothed, so we had to come up with something else. Yun sprang up, having eaten around the meat on her plate, and grabbed Rei’s arm. “Come on, let’s go see about finding Kuruk’s family,” she said, to which Rei cocked an eyebrow.

“Why am _I_ coming along? He was not my father.”

Yun switched to her choppy Hitennese to avoid being overheard and said with a falsely cheerful voice, “Because you jeopardized an entire tribe the last time we left you alone. Let’s go.”

Rei followed reluctantly after they had thanked our hosts for the meal, hand in hand with Yun, and the room grew slightly but noticeably colder. That was one half of the issue taken care of, and since Tiaraq hadn’t said anything to Sanara yet we decided to trust that he wouldn’t.

“I have to admit, I wasn’t sure about the steamed sea prunes, but they were very good,” I said with a polite nod. “Thank you for the meal, Chief. I don’t mean to run off, but we should get to those waterbending lessons.”

“Of course, please enjoy everything our tribe has to offer, Avatar Kyoshi.”

We bowed, and Nanuq and I were heading to the main entry hall when I felt someone following us through the ice. Tiaraq was trailing behind, and he beckoned me back when I looked over my shoulder. “You go on, I’ll be right behind you,” I said. Nanuq started out of the palace while I hung back to let Tiaraq catch up. “I have to give you a little credit, I wasn’t ever able to get Rei into bed, not for months. So I’ll concede that. What did you need?”

“I didn’t want to tell Nanuq this, but—” Tiaraq looks out over the tribe from the entry hall, over all the snow-capped buildings and the freezing harbor beyond— “our mother told me to do whatever I could to get the Shuibei to listen to us.”

“Your mother told you to fuck the crown princess? I don’t mean to be rude, but your family sounds a bit odd.” If our meeting hadn’t been chance, perhaps I might have suspected she said the same thing to Nanuq about me.

“That wasn’t planned, I really did have too much to drink and woke up in her bed. I don’t even know if we actually slept together. She’s not with child, so I guess it’s not important. I played along because the most I was hoping for was impressing the chief on a hunting trip or something. Nanuq was right, our tribe is dying because we don’t have enough people to sustain it. If this at least gets us the room to expand for a few generations, then we might survive. It’s my duty as a prince to protect my people, so…I went along with what she wanted.”

“So why are you putting all that in danger?” I asked. I didn’t have the same frame of reference as him, my hometown could burn for all I cared, but the tribe was clearly important to them. “Is Sanara just not to your tastes? I think she’s pretty.”

“Yes, she’s pretty, but when I saw Rei yesterday, I—how did you feel when you first saw Nanuq?”

“Honestly? I thought he was a girl until he took off his parka. Even then I wasn’t entirely sure for a few minutes.”

He rolled his eyes. “Well, I’ve never felt the way I felt when I first saw Rei,” Tiaraq said, then looked back toward the dining hall. “I’ve taken up too much of your time already. Thanks for listening, I suppose.”

I grabbed his arm before he could duck away and clapped him on the shoulder. “Look, we don’t know each other very well, but I love your brother, so the things that are important to him are important to me. That includes you and your tribe. So I’ll help you figure this out, all right? We all will. Just stay away from my Fire Sage until we find a solution.”

Tiaraq nodded with a trace of a smile. “Thank you, Kyoshi.”

He slipped back to the dining hall, and I hurried off to catch up with Nanuq. It turned out that he hadn’t gone far, only to the end of the courtyard, and fell in beside me as we tried to make sense of the streets and canals with only light from various scattered candles to guide us. “So what did Tiaraq want?” Nanuq asked, and I fell a step behind him in surprise. He glanced over his shoulder. “Come on, I’m not stupid.”

No, he certainly wasn’t. I caught up with him and strolled along, rubbing my hands together for warmth. “He wanted help with all of this, so I told him I’d help.”

“I thought you wanted to get through the Northern Water Tribe without anyone asking for help.”

“Kuruk ruined that plan yesterday. And besides,” I said, stopping and pulling him into a narrow side street between two buildings, “he has a very comely younger brother.”

His hands settled on my hips, and the way his eyes shone in the candlelight made them look almost reverent. I flicked one of the braids that hung over his right ear and smiled when he stood on his toes to try and close the distance between us. “Sometimes I want to climb you like a tree,” he said under his breath.

“Far be it from me to decline an offer like that…should we skip the lessons?”

“No, you’ve got to keep a routine during the dark months. Go out and do things, stuff like that. Otherwise you’ll end up sleeping three quarters of the day and drive yourself crazy.”

He leaned back slightly so I could kneel down and kiss him, suckling on his lower lip for a moment, before I straightened up and left him leaning into my chest. “I always kind of thought I’d be taller than whoever I ended up with,” Nanuq said into my coat. He didn’t seem to mind where he was all that much, from what I could see.

“Now now, you were the one who wanted the Avatar, with all her issues and all her height.”

“I still do.”

That brought on a pleasant twinge in my belly, but I only took his hand and led him back to the street. “Well, I promise that the feeling is mutual,” I said as we crossed an ice bridge that had no business feeling as unstable as it did. “So Yun has Rei under control, and Tiaraq’s busy with the wedding nonsense again…why don’t we make this lesson a bit more interesting?”

“What did you have in mind?”

“I’m sure there’ll be sparring at some point. How about this: if you win, you can do whatever you’d like. You’ll have the Avatar, the bridge between the worlds, keeper of balance and all that drivel completely at your mercy.”

“And if you win?” he asked as we came to an intersection. Based on the directions the chief had given us, it wasn’t far to the waterbending academy. I put my hand right below my hips.

“Then I want to see if your tongue can reach this high when you’re on your knees.”

His reaction was still deliciously conflicted when we arrived at the academy. The building’s façade was ice, like almost everything else in the tribe, but from what I could tell there wasn’t any kind of underlying support like timber or stone. Perhaps they wanted to show off. From the little bits of decorative flair on the edifice, I was almost sure that was the case.

Some of the masters who were between classes almost tripped over themselves to instruct us when they found out I was the Avatar, and we settled on one nearer to our age than the rest. Iluq was maybe thirty at the most, with a bit more spryness to her than the other instructors twice her age. Most of what she had to show us wasn’t exactly new, incorporating airbending-like circular movements to help redirect greater amounts of force, and Nanuq seemed happy to throw his own Tayagun flair on the techniques she had us practice. It was when I asked about things that were useful outside of combat that the day got more interesting. Like with earthbending, there was a way to hold water still in the air with a minimum of motion, and ways to form it into hooks, icepicks, or anything else with a point or a blade. I had a good bit of fun swinging one great big hook suspended at the end of a stream coming off my right arm before we got to the promised sparring. Nanuq spun up two thick streams from the channels around the training area, the water revolving around him at perpendicular angles. “So how many elements am I fighting, Avatar?”

“Just the one.” I took a much smaller amount of water and fastened it around my right arm, encasing it in ice that narrowed to a dull point another hand’s length past my fist. Our instructor stepped out of the way—far out of the way, as was probably wise. “I wouldn’t want you calling foul when you lose.”

“Guess your pride towers over everything, too,” he said, and sent one thin tendril snapping toward my side. The _crack_ of the water whip sounded pleasantly familiar, all too much like rocks crashing against one another, and I could feel my heart jump. “Ladies first.”

“Big mistake.”

I grabbed at the tendril he’d sent out and then stabbed at it with the ice, frosting over the surface all the way back to the stream it had come from, then grabbed the end and tossed it back at him. Nanuq batted it down easily, but it cost him his focus for a few seconds, and that was enough. He had to jump clear of my spike when I lunged at him, spinning and transferring the motion to a long, sweeping strike across my midsection. It froze an instant before shattering against my side, chilling and stinging all at once through my clothes. “First blood is mine,” he said as he balanced himself again and snatched back what water laid as ice by my feet.

First blood and his last, if I had anything to say about it. I threw myself forward, right into the streams of water encircling him. They hardened up, as I expected, and the sting of ice on my cheek was a small price to pay to catch his shoulder with my spike. He winced, but the tip was dull enough to keep from piercing his clothes or drawing blood. No reason to break my own toys, after all. Nanuq pushed forward with his other side, and the water sent me back quickly enough to send my boots skidding over the floor.

He rubbed his shoulder for a moment and winced when he felt the forming bruise at the point of impact. “You still fight like an earthbender,” he said.

“You say that as if it’s a bad thing.”

I slipped the ice onto my other hand—waterbending didn’t make the damn stuff any warmer—and cut down the small sheets of ice he sent my way. They were fragile enough to bat away with my bare hand too, and all the ice he could throw wasn’t enough to actually stop me from advancing again. I jammed the spike into one of the streams of water encircling him and froze it solid, sending it to the floor where it shattered. Nanuq pulled the second stream out of my reach, split it, and sent one end into my stomach. My feet came up off the ground, my gut flipped around inside me, and I landed on my back. All the air in my lungs disappeared. Nanuq lunged forward, propelled by the other end of the water, and landed atop me with his forearm across my shoulders. His smile would have been unbearable, if it hadn’t been so cute. “Looks like I win,” he said.

“Did you?”

He followed my gaze down to his side, where the freshly sharpened point of my spike rested snugly against the soft skin below his ribs. I poked him ever so slightly, enough to make him ease up off my shoulders and nudge the ice away. “Last blood is mine,” I said, and rolled my hips up against his. I grabbed him by the collar and pulled him down until I was close enough to bite at his lip. “How about we call it a tie?”


	43. Escalating Aggression

When Yun and Rei returned to the palace, it was with a large group of Water Tribe folk, most of whom looked to be in their thirties or so and very fascinated with our renegade nun. They accompanied her as far as the palace courtyard where Nanuq and I were practicing, then trapped her in a crushing hug that Rei only barely sidestepped. She tried to stroll past us with only a slight bow for greeting, but Nanuq peeled off from our practice area and followed her.

“I do not need a chaperone every minute of the day,” she said indignantly, excited enough to make the snow at her feet steam up.

“We’ll have to agree to disagree on that, but I actually have a deal for you.” Nanuq nodded toward the palace. “Let’s go talk about it before you melt anything.”

So that was why he’d been so quiet since we’d returned. I thought he’d been trying to figure out how I was going to collect on our wager—which I still fully intended to do, tie or not. They went up the palace steps together, and I turned back to where Yun had gotten free of the crush of people. She was fixing her pendant as she came up to me, trying to untwist the beads that had gotten jostled. “What was all that about?” I asked. “Were they fascinated by your airbending?”

“No, those were, ah…my half-siblings,” Yun said as she turned back to wave goodbye to the crowd. Of course. “Some of them, anyway. They get very excited when they meet a new one, and I’m also the youngest. There was lots of doting.”

“At least now I know why Kuruk never had time to do anything notable, he was too busy making sure his tribe would never have an underpopulation problem.” Yun snickered at that as we started to walk inside. “I’m glad you found what you were looking for. How was Rei?”

“She managed to stay polite and not talk about Tiaraq. I couldn’t get anything out of her about this whole thing, though. Oh, and they thought she was another half-sister at first.”

“I’m sure she would’ve liked her own hug pile. Come on, let’s go inside and get out of the cold. Out of _this_ cold, anyway.”

The palace was still pretty damn cold. Still, we crossed the courtyard and went inside, where the entry hall was largely empty thanks to the court session going on. I had absolutely no interest in listening to another group of nobles and functionaries drone on for hours, so we peeled off and started for the guest wing. If nothing else, a nice nap under the thick fur blankets would do us some good.

Rei’s door was ajar when we arrived, and I poked my head in just in case. The wrong—or perhaps right, under the circumstances—brother was inside with her, though. Nanuq glanced over and waved us inside. Rei looked impassively at us, then let go of the hem of her upper robe. “Is everything all right?” I asked as we stepped in.

“I was just explaining to Rei what I think I can do.”

Nanuq produced a water skin from inside his coat, smaller than the ones he kept on his hips. “This is the spirit water I took from the oasis yesterday. I know your burns mostly healed when that dragon…did whatever it did to you, but they still hurt, don’t they? And your voice is still rasping.”

Rei touched at her throat. “The burns do not hurt terribly anymore, but they still ache sometimes. And speaking too loudly can leave me hoarse. But those burns are internal. I have paid healers to try, but running water along my neck has never done anything.”

“They didn’t have spirit water,” Nanuq said, pulling out the stopper on the water skin and bending some through the opening. It seemed to glow faintly under its own power, drawing the eye with its enchanting luminescence. He sent it back into the water skin and stopped it up. “Plus, at the risk of giving myself too much credit, none of them were me.”

“The _risk_?” Rei asked dryly.

Nanuq ignored that and moved on. “I think you’re right about it not doing much externally, though. After I work on the burns, I want to try steaming up a small bit of the spirit water and working from the inside of your throat, too.”

It wasn’t exactly what I would call safe, but if anyone could do it, I’d want it to be Nanuq. Rei frowned as she considered it, then rolled up one sleeve to where the skin was marked. She curled her arm at the elbow, wincing when the burned skin stretched taut. “It would be nice not to have to modify my bending forms around what I can comfortably do,” Rei said. “As for my voice…I admit, I do not like the rasp, nor the strain it causes. Very well. You may try treating the burns. If that works, we can attempt my throat. Provided this deal you mentioned is satisfactory.”

I had a feeling about what he was going to say. Nanuq rubbed at his arm and stretched his mouth out to a thin line. “Just—let this marriage thing run its course, please. Even if you have to rebuff Tiaraq. He got into this mess by thinking with the wrong head, I can’t let him screw everything up by doing the same.”

“How flattering to think my beauty can overmatch the wits of a prince,” Rei muttered. “As you wish, Nanuq. Very clever to back me into a corner with such an offer before naming your price. Shall we begin now?”

“No time like the present. I’ll need you to take off your clothes, I don’t want to have them absorb the water.”

“One more thing, then,” Rei said. She stood up, walked up to me as she smoothed out her robe, and pushed me out of the room before shutting the door.

“Hey, come on! I’ve already seen you naked!”

“No, Kyoshi,” came Rei’s muffled voice. I knocked once, but the door quickly became too hot to touch. “Go and cool off in some ice water. You seem to need it.”

“You’re so cruel, Rei…and how come you didn’t kick Yun out, too?”

Nanuq answered me then, a bit sheepishly. “I need an assistant. We’ll be done in a few hours, why don’t you explore the palace?”

I hoped that those two would still have some energy afterward, I didn’t plan on suffering exclusion silently. Well. No point in standing around, scratching at the door like a desperate dog. Surely there were plenty of things I could do…I could nap, but Nanuq’s warning about keeping a routine echoed in my mind. There was always the court session going on, but I’d had my fill of politics back in Hitenno. That left walking around or more practicing, and my arms were already sore. With plenty of palace left unexplored, I was sure I could kill a few hours.

My face paint was enough of an identifier, and no one gave me any trouble as I walked around. It was certainly a palace, though more compact than the one in Kasai to preserve what heat came from the torches and the stone hearths in the larger rooms. The construction was really rather ingenious, though I couldn’t help thinking it was all in service to solving a problem that really didn’t need to exist in the first place. Whoever had first set foot on the ice shelf and decided that it was where they were going to make their home had made a very bold choice.

All my wandering brought me to a part of the palace I didn’t recognize, with smaller hallways and less imposing doors. There were no guards in sight, and tapping the floor with my heel didn’t reveal anyone nearby, though that might have been because I was trying to peer through mostly ice rather than proper earth.

Stupid Rei. She was naked as the day she was born when we first met, it seemed silly to suddenly get modest. And she took both my lovers, so I couldn’t even pass the time properly. Tiaraq and Sanara were probably in court, and that was largely everyone I knew in the tribe. There were few things I disliked more than being left alone. I could have tried pulling Kuruk and Yangchen out of the void, but I got the distinct sense that they would start bickering if I did.

Without a destination in mind, I tried a door at random and found it opening under my light push. I glanced inside, thinking of an excuse if someone wanted to know what I was doing, but there was no one in the room. It looked to be an office, a private one if the lack of ornamentation was anything to go by, with a Chikyan-style desk stacked with papers set against one wall. The chief’s office? Or some minor government functionary?

Something inside me tugged uncomfortably, a draw I couldn’t quite place. Avatar’s instinct, perhaps. I looked up and down the hall to make sure no one was coming my way, then slipped inside. It was an office like any other, not terribly interesting to someone who couldn’t read the local language very well, but I still thumbed through some of the scrolls. The Shui language looked much prettier than it sounded, though I had no idea what any of it actually meant.

One scroll turned out to be a map, a detailing of patrol routes for guards around the city and for ships out in the harbor. They seemed very careful around the port and the palace, less so everywhere else. Still, the map was nice to look at, and I tried smoothing it out to see the edges of the tribe’s layout. My hand went a little too far, though, and knocked into a stack of scrolls on the side of the desk. I swore and went about picking them up, but I could see that one of them was another map as it unfurled, though not of the city or the surrounding ice sheet and harbor. I nudged it open further with one finger and narrowed my eyes. No, it certainly wasn’t the North Pole, but very similar to it. There were the same jagged borders indicating ice, only with very different geography. And the landmasses beyond the harbor didn’t look anything like the northern reaches of the Earth Kingdom, if anything they looked more like…like Patola.

I flipped the map around, and suddenly the compass rose made much more sense. It was a map of the _South_ Pole, with a large part in one color and a much smaller area in another. There were a number of little arrows pointing into the smaller region.

Something about it didn’t sit well with me. Before I could reflect on the foolishness of stealing from my hosts, I rolled up the map and tucked it into my robe. I tried to arrange everything else back in the way I had found it, stacking the other fallen scrolls on the desk, but I didn’t want to spend too much time there, lest someone find me. When I was satisfied with the scroll pile, I crept back to the door, peered out into the hall, and hurried off the way I had come.

Court still seemed to be going on when I found my way back to the main hall, which probably meant that Tiaraq was still in there. Even if he wasn’t, with so many unknowns over the odd map, I’d rather have Nanuq look at it. Tiaraq had already been less than honest, after all.

Rei’s room was still shut tight when I returned to the guest wing, but rather than interrupt them I dipped into our own room, tapping at the map still tucked in over my stomach. Something about it gave me a bad feeling, one that wasn’t going to go away until I had settled the matter.

Of course, the one person I trusted to inform me about the situation was locked up across the hall, and I was too tired from sparring and practicing to do very much. Damn the warning about a routine, I was going to get some sleep. It was too cold to stay up and read any of the Chikyan-script books they had supplied our room with. The fur bed sheets were a warm and welcome respite from the cold, and there was barely any time between closing my eyes and drifting off.

⁂

“Kyoshi… _Kyoshi_ …”

I batted at whoever was nudging my shoulder through the furs, groaning and curling up tighter. “Sleeping. Go find another Avatar.”

“Come on, get up. You’ll miss dinner. And you’ll screw up your body’s sleep rhythm like this.”

Dinner didn’t sound so bad. I rolled toward the voice and let someone pat my head until I opened my eyes. It seemed that Yun had been released from her duties as Nanuq’s assistant. “You’re hair’s all messy.”

“I was in what amounted to a sauna for several hours, you try that and see how your hair looks.”

She leaned down to kiss the crown of my head. “How’d it go?” I asked. “Did Rei get all her burns healed and finally turn into a dragon?”

“You are not nearly as funny as you think you are, Kyoshi.”

The voice was fleetingly familiar, very near in my memory but not quite…I sat up and looked around the room. Rei was leaning against the doorway in only her underclothes, hair down and in the same sorry state as Yun’s, with the burns snaking over her arms having faded significantly. Suddenly I could place the voice: it was how she sounded in the spirit world, when she wasn’t burned. She raised one eyebrow.

“It’s almost too bad, I liked the rasp,” I said.

“Then I have to thank Nanuq again for getting rid of it.”

I got out of bed and stretched out all the sore spots that had built up. “Really though, you’re all right now? No more painful stretching or sounding like you have sandpaper in your throat?”

She nodded and touched at one of the traces of a burn on her arm. “There may still be some tightness around my waist, but other than that and these discolorations, I may as well not have been burned. Nanuq is quite skilled at this.”

“Good. Where’d he get to? I found something I wanted him to see.”

“Cleaning up in Rei’s room,” Yun said.

The first few steps out of bed were uncertain, but I managed to make it across the hall. It certainly felt like a sauna, warm and unpleasantly humid. Nanuq was working on pulling the water out of the air before it froze in place, funneling it all down into a basin. I went up beside him and mimicked his movements, a blend of airbending and waterbending forms that brought the arms in a wide spiral around the body. Watching the water simply…appear in mid-air was fascinating, though with both of us working at it the funnel only stayed in place for a few minutes.

“I need a change of clothes, it feels like I spent all day in a glasshouse during the sunny season,” Nanuq said as he froze the water in the basin. “Thanks for helping me clean up. Everything went well, Rei should be fine to talk and eat now.”

“She’s already back to snarking at me. It’s still humid in here, come across the hall. I found this map I couldn’t make sense of and I wanted you to look at it.”

“You _found_ a map?” he asked as we went back into my room. Yun was combing Rei’s hair back from its tangled state and redoing her braid, but they both looked up when we entered.

“All right, I took a map when I was wandering around the palace. I’m not perfect. Just look at it.”

I took it from my robe and unrolled it on the bed. It didn’t seem to make any more sense to Yun and Rei as it did for me, but Nanuq looked confused as he studied it. He ran one finger along the middle, following a dotted line in the ink between two areas. “This is all the usable land in the south,” he said.

Yun seemed to be able to get a sense of the scale from the depiction of one of the Air Nomad islands that had been drawn. “That’s it? It’s barely any larger than all of Patola.”

“There are glaciers on either side. All the waterbenders there aren’t enough to move them or even chip away much.” Nanuq tapped near the bottom of the map. “And we can’t settle much farther south than this, the blizzards around the South Pole forest make it impossible to build anything that lasts.”

“How can a forest grow in such extreme conditions?” Rei asked.

“I don’t know, how do panda lilies grow in volcano calderas? My sister thinks it’s spirits, but no one wants to go down there to find out. We’re getting sidetracked, the forest isn’t the important thing here. This part they colored in with blue lines, that’s the Shuinan territory. The Disin tribe used to be here, and the Lonban were here on this part of the coast. Both got absorbed, they didn’t have enough people to sustain their population.”

“And the part with the red lines?” I asked, knowing the answer but worrying over it all the same.

“Tayagun territory. See, we’ve only got this little sliver of coast access, but the western glacier slopes down here enough that we can climb up and hunt the seals and penguins that end up around there. And these arrows are, they’re…oh, Sanna, no…”

His mouth flattened down to a thin line as he looked more closely at the map, tracing the arrows over and over as if he could change them. “Nanuq?” Rei asked.

“These are blind spots between some of our watchtowers,” he said, and pointed to the small dots that marked off the towers. “Not all of them get used every day because we don’t have enough people, and these two don’t usually have people in them. If you knew that they weren’t being used one day, and there was enough snow cover, you could probably get more than a hundred troops through on each side before anyone noticed.”

Oh, fuck. I knew that bad feeling wasn’t for nothing, it was probably a Water Tribe Avatar trying to get me to notice that something wasn’t right. “They shouldn’t have known these towers weren’t being used, they look identical to all the others. It would need to be a scout coming right up to the wall and looking inside each one, or somebody would have to…”

Nanuq ran one hand into his hair with a long, shuddering breath. “Or somebody would have to tell them.”

“You don’t think—” I went ahead and cut myself off. There was no reason to cast aspersions yet. “We don’t even know what this map is for, it might be some minister drawing things up in his spare time.”

“Plans for a hypothetical invasion don’t make me feel much better than plans for a _real_ invasion of my home,” Nanuq snapped. He slumped against the wall and slid down to the floor. “Do you really believe that, anyway?”

“No, I guess not. I didn’t want to jump right to the obvious possibility.”

“The simplest answer is usually the truth,” Rei said, rolling nervously back and forth on her heels. “Though I think we would do well to speak with Tiaraq about this before impugning him.”

Nanuq nodded, then looked up at me. “Where did you find that map?”

“Some office in the other wing of the palace. Look, let’s go find Tiaraq and ask him about this, then we can figure out what to do.”

“It doesn’t seem like a good idea to ask him,” Yun said as she rolled up the map and tucked it into her sleeve. Better that no one see it if they walk into the room. We all raised an eyebrow at her, so she explained. “Think about it. If he did tell them about these weaknesses in the tribe’s defenses, he’s going to know we have the map and probably tell the chief. If he didn’t, and it really was a scout report or something, it could make him angry enough to break off the betrothal, and that’s not a bad pretense for a war. That’s not even taking into account how hard it’s going to be to get him away from Sanara again, they’re basically stuck to each other.”

Her assessment was sensible, but it didn’t seem to make Nanuq feel any better. “What am I supposed to do, then? Wonder if my brother betrayed our tribe?”

“It is late, and we are all tired,” Rei said cautiously, venturing to put a hand on Nanuq’s shoulder. “Nothing will be decided in one day, and we have weeks to resolve this and the wedding business. And we will all help you, of course, but right now you need your rest. All that healing had to be exhausting.”

“I don’t know how I’m going to get to sleep with this hanging over my head.”

“Come on,” I said, and reached down to take his hand. “You’ll freeze your butt off sitting down there. Rei’s right, we’ll do better if we come at this fresh in the morning. Or what passes for morning around here.”

He still had a frown, but he let me pull him onto the bed and under the sheets. Yun crawled in behind me and curled up to my back, and even Rei hung around, nestling herself against Nanuq. She snuffed the room lamp, and for a moment, even with all the intertribal issues threatening to boil over, everything seemed all right. I knew it couldn’t last, but it seemed all right.

⁂

Whatever the universe had planned, it certainly didn’t seem to be on our side.

We all woke up in a sweat—the furs _and_ Rei turned out to be too much—and it was a delicate process getting ourselves dry before anything could freeze on us. Once everyone was dry and in better clothes, I caught the feeling of something through the ice. Lots of activity I couldn’t quite place, since it was harder to get a sense of things through ice than it was through solid ground. It might’ve been the typical hustle and bustle of the morning, but I couldn’t be sure.

“Gods, Rei, you’re like a furnace,” Yun said as she fixed the links of her pendant.

“I am a firebender housing the spirit of a dragon, you should not sound so surprised. That this ice palace is still standing at all is a wonder.”

Nanuq reached around and touched at his back with a frown. “I think you scalded that spot you cuddled up to…”

“All right, all right, let’s just get breakfast and figure out what to do about the Shui and the Tayagun,” I said. I put on some fresh face paint and fixed my hair before we headed out. “Seems like there’s a lot going on this morning.”

Rei nodded and straightened her collar. “Quite the excitement for it being so cold and dark.”

In the main hall, we couldn’t make sense of what everyone was doing, running around like chickens missing their heads. Finally we were able to waylay Sanara, bursting with energy as she directed people both around the palace and out through the main doors. “Your Highness is very busy this morning, did something happen?” Nanuq asked.

Her smile looked absolutely genuine and not at all brought down by our obvious lack of energy. “Well, the aurora’s out,” Sanara said breathlessly, gesturing skyward even though we were inside. “Don’t you have the same traditions in the south?”

Nanuq frowned. “I’m sure there’s some overlap, but we have our own traditions and beliefs. The aurora’s nice, but it’s visible most of the time during the dark season. What tradition are you talking about?”

“That it’s auspicious to be married under the lights! Please head over to the oasis as soon as you can!”

There was a small but noticeable shift in all the ice around us, as if the palace had tilted ever so slightly. Sanara apparently mistook Nanuq’s look of horrified shock for a smile, and met it with one of her own before hurrying off to direct more workers. He turned back to us instead. “You said there would be time, Rei!” he hissed.

“I cannot predict aurorae,” she said, and folded her arms. “Admittedly, this presents a problem…we have to be prompt about this. Would Tiaraq still be here, or on his way to the oasis?”

Nanuq looked around, but the only people we could see were nameless, faceless workers. “I would guess he’s around here, if Sanara hasn’t left already. Somewhere, at least. What did you have in mind?”

“The weather has forced our hands, I do not think there remains an option to not show him that map,” Rei said. “If you and Yun can find him and get him alone long enough to see what the Shui are plotting, perhaps we can end this.”

“What if he’s already gone?” I asked.

“Then you and I will go to the oasis, find him, and tell him the same. I can reconstruct most of the map in my mind, that will have to be enough until we can regroup.”

We had no time to discuss or refine Rei’s plan, but it was all we had. Yun and Nanuq hurried deeper into the palace while Rei and I started for the main doors. “I hope you’re right about this, Rei. This marriage could be a pretext for invasion.”

“Have a little faith, Avatar.”

I retraced the route I had taken with Yun and Nanuq to the oasis two days prior, where extra torches were being lit to mark the route from the palace. As Sanara had said, the aurora was shining in the sky, lustrous green bands cutting across the dark. Very beautiful, very inconvenient. We kept bumping against people rushing to and from the oasis, carrying things there and then hurrying back for more. “The way she’s been talking about this, you wouldn’t think she could pull an entire wedding out of her ass on a few hours’ notice.”

“Perhaps the crown princess sacrificed some of the more elaborate parts of the ceremony in the interests of auspice.”

How irritatingly pragmatic.

The oasis gates had been propped open to allow easy access for the people bringing in cushions and tables, and no one tried to stop us as we went inside. Both of us shivered as we crossed the threshold, despite the jump in warmth in the air. There was an energy there, quite unlike how it had felt on my last visit, simmering below the surface. “Something feels wrong,” Rei said under her breath. “The air is far too heavy.”

“I’m getting that, too. It wasn’t like this the other day. Let’s just see if we can find Tiaraq or slow this thing down.”

For a small place, the spirit oasis could accommodate a great many people, and we had to bump and jostle our way around workers to try and pick out our errant prince. We looked back behind the pond, near the gates, even in the little hut set aside for clerics, but it became increasingly clear as we searched that he simply wasn’t there. All the while, the whole place felt _wrong_ , as if the spirits were unhappy about the intrusion of so many humans into their grove. As if something was watching.

“He must still be at the palace,” Rei said as we sat against the clerics’ hut.

“Then let’s hope Yun and Nanuq had better luck.” I wanted to jab at the ground, but that seemed like a bad idea in a sacred place. “Couldn’t I just threaten the chief?”

“I suppose you _could_ , but you cannot sit between the southern tribes forever, making sure the Shui do nothing,” Rei said. “And given your very obvious conflict of interest in favor of the Tayagun, you would be opening yourself up to accusations of favoritism.”

“What should I care about accusations? I’m not the Avatar by the good graces of the powers that be. Should I stay friendless and alone so I can enforce some arbitrary notion of balance?”

“No,” she said quietly. “No, you should not. But I do not know what to tell you about what you should do.”

“Then I ought to solve this my way—do you hear chanting?”

She nodded, and we both stood. All the workers who had been hurrying about shoved themselves to the sides of the oasis as the head of the wedding procession crossed the threshold. The air grew even heavier and more uncomfortable, almost thick. “No, no…they were too late. Damn it all. I don’t care if it ruins the ceremony, I’m going to get that map and force some answers before this happens.”

“Kyoshi—”

“Don’t try and stop me, Rei!”

“No, look.” She reached up and pitched my head skyward. Something was rippling within the aurora, a faint pinprick of light much brighter than anything else around it. My stomach twisted over itself. “That is not natural, I can feel it.”

“What should we do?”

She didn’t have time to answer before whatever it was streaked down from the sky so fast that a shockwave exploded on its approach. I grabbed my fans and sent a stream of air to meet it, but everyone was still thrown from their feet. Rei rolled into my side and knocked both of us over, and for a moment I couldn’t tell which way was up and which was down.

“Kyoshi, get up, get on your feet, we have a problem,” Rei said with a wavering voice.

Eventually my hands found the grass and I was able to orient myself, but my stomach only knotted further. Hovering over the pond in the middle of the oasis was a serpentine mass of perfect black, with a bone-white beak and a head ringed by massive red feathers. Its beady little eyes ignored the mass of screaming wedding guests to focus on me. Its voice was like nails scraping on skin right beside my ears, a nauseating and invasive warble. “Oh, Raava and her latest shell. You deflected my blast.”

“Yonheng.”

Its body twirls in place, and its beak clicked in such a way to intentionally mismatch with its voice as its gaze fixed on Rei. “And the burned bridge. Why do you two always pop up in the middle of all the fun?”

“You already cheated your way out of the spirit world,” Rei said, digging her feet into the ground as she lowered into a fighting stance. “What do you want now?”

Yonheng waved its tail lazily toward the gates, where people were still pushing madly to try and escape. “So much energy here, where the veil between our worlds is thin…and you shells are so interesting when you have fear flowing through you—”

Rei didn’t wait for it to finish before she thrust out one arm and sent a bolt of lightning across the oasis. Yonheng writhed as it struck, then jammed its tail into the nearest patch of ground to send the current out from its body. I tore a chunk of ice from the glaciers surrounding the oasis and sent it screaming downward, but Yonheng twisted away, skirting around the bounds of the oasis before diving toward us. We managed to force it off-course with fire, but it simply whirled around for another, stronger pass.

“How do we deal with a spirit that already died once?” I asked as I yanked up parts of the ground to keep anything from hitting the people still trying to get away.

“When I think of something, you will be the first person I tell. Here it comes again!”

We deflected one more pass, then another. Yonheng came screaming down from the sky a fourth time, and I knew fire would only work so much. I waited, rooting myself deep into the soil around my feet. Either the timing would be perfect, or we were both dead. There had been better odds, certainly. “Not yet, not yet…Rei, lightning!”

The oasis flashed blue as the bolt went shooting out from her fingertips. It struck home, and Yonheng slowed just enough for me to pull a spear of hardened earth from the ground. The tip struck Yonheng in the side, running through and breaking out on the other side of its body in a spray of what looked like thick gray smoke. It screeched over the crackle of the lightning, piercing our ears and costing me my focus for a moment. The spear began to fracture, enough for Yonheng to whip its tail down toward the ground again. I ran up and scorched the end of the tail as it descended, but it refused to stop, and it came down on my wrist so cleanly that for a moment I had no inkling that my right hand was simply gone.

Only for a moment.

I pulled my arm back on reflex when the pain struck, and the sound I made was less than human. Warm blood trickled onto my coat as I fell over, and I was only dimly aware that the blue light around us was growing brighter and casting ever more extreme shadows. Yonheng’s bulk collapsed while lightning coursed through it. Rei. I had to help Rei. Slowly, I tried to work more earth free to bind it, but my focus failed, and nothing more than tremors rocked the ground beneath me.

All the grass and ice at the edges of my vision began going white, and suddenly my body wasn’t my own, moving under its own power, under the Avatar spirit’s power. I stood, bloody wrist still tucked in against my chest, and took slow, unsteady steps toward the smoking mass that Rei was still shooting full of lightning. She gasped and stumbled back when I approached, but I didn’t walk toward her. Yonheng’s tiny yellow eyes followed me as I sank down beside it and jabbed one knee into its neck. My remaining hand tore away some of the scales lining its body and reached inside, through the eerily empty inside of its body.

“You wanted to see the human world?” I asked, my voice rumbling in a multitude of many. My hand settled on something soft and blazing-hot, then pulled it out. The body around it shriveled through its death throes as my hand drew back, holding an incredible brightness that outshone the torches and even the remains of Rei’s lightning. “You can see it like this.”

One of the tables set up for the wedding had overturned, and all the still-living seafood that had been on it was twisting and thrashing in the grass. My hand pushed the brightness into one of the eels trying to move through the grass, then plucked it from the ground and dropped it in a jar of water that had managed to stay in one piece.

The white in my eyes faded, and all I was left with was a sealed jar and a blinding pain in my wrist. I slumped forward, watching the tiny eel swim around its new confines while footsteps approached from behind me. “Kyoshi…?” Rei asked nervously. The air around her smelled burned and charred.

“Don’t forget my hand over there,” I said, and collapsed.

⁂

“I’m sorry, I—I’m so sorry.”

Nanuq drew the spirit water away from my wrist for the ninth time, where it had failed again to knit back to the skin of my hand right beside it. He was obviously exhausted, he had been trying for the better part of the day with all the spirit water he had been able to take from what was left of the oasis, but by then we had both realized that it wasn’t going to happen. Nanuq buried his face in his hands and shuddered.

“Hey.” I turned on my side and reached for his shoulder, enough to nudge him into looking at me with tired, tearful eyes. “Don’t be like that. We knew this was a long shot. It doesn’t hurt anymore, at least.”

I sat up and looked at what remained. The tail had gone through cleanly at my wrist, and with Nanuq’s efforts some fresh, ghost-pale skin had grown over the wound. I touched it lightly, and while it didn’t hurt, it was very sensitive. I reached over for a roll of bandages and started wrapping it up. Doing it one-handed was awkward, to say the least.

“We should’ve gone with you,” Nanuq said, looking past me and at Rei, sitting quietly beside Yun on the other side of our room with the jar in her lap. “We shouldn’t have split up.”

“Don’t blame Rei,” I said as I tucked the end of the bandage in under the bottom layer, against my skin. “She was the only one who came up with a plan, and none of us could have predicted crazy spirits coming out of nowhere. I know we’re all frazzled, but don’t fight. We dealt with it. We’re just lucky that no one died.”

The spirit oasis was in shambles, covered in scorch marks from fire and lightning strikes, not to mention all the earth had I ripped up, but everyone was alive. I decided to take that victory. The price was…high, I thought as I looked down at what had been my hand, but I could grieve its loss later, in private where I could actually absorb the weight of it. Right then, not much felt like it had changed, except that nothing happened when I tried to move my fingers.

“So…this thing is from the spirit world?” Yun asked as she tapped on the jar in Rei’s lap. The eel swam up to her finger and followed it as she drew it along the surface. “From Baihe?”

Rei nodded. “This is the being we traded part of our mortality to while you were unconscious. It died there, and was able to slip between the border that divides the spirit world from ours. Perhaps it kept to the oasis because of the energy there and tried to take the opportunity to feed. Or it simply does not like me and Kyoshi. Rather than send it back to the spirit world to scheme—if we even _could_ kill it a second time, and I do not know if that would be possible—Kyoshi forced its essence into this, where it can do no harm. Some kind of delicacy.”

“It’s an unagi,” Nanuq said. “They can get big if they have enough space, otherwise they stay small. Is it going to have that spirit’s mind, do you think?”

I shook my head. “Can’t tell you why, but I think it’ll be a plain old unagi. Some other Avatar must know better than me about these things.”

There was a knock at the door, and Yun got up to answer it. I rolled my sleeve down as Chief Anyu, Sanara and Tiaraq stepped inside. Our hosts looked downcast, but I couldn’t discern Tiaraq’s expression. “My apologies about the oasis,” I said.

“That’s of no concern now.” Anyu bowed deeply, almost getting himself parallel with the floor before straightening up. “I don’t know how to thank you for saving my people, Avatar Kyoshi.”

“How about some honesty?” Nanuq asked. When Anyu raised an eyebrow, Nanuq produced the map from inside his coat and unrolled it, thrusting it out in accusation toward the chief. “Why are you planning troop movements around Tayagun watchtowers?”

Sanara gasped, Tiaraq looked nervously between Anyu and his brother, and the chief’s gratitude faded until all that was left was the cool gaze of someone in power trying to save face. “You shouldn’t take things that don’t belong to you,” he said as he reached out, but I snatched the map before he could.

“I took it,” I said. I went to roll it back up, but the paper only hit what was left of my wrist, and I had to roll it one-handed as I stood up, until I was easily a head taller than him. “So please, enlighten me.”

“Father?” Sanara asked.

Anyu looked around the room, suddenly uncomfortably aware that Rei, Yun and Tiaraq were blocking the exit. He sighed with the barest traces of a mirthless smile. “It seems like poor form to lie to someone who just saved my tribe,” he said, squaring his shoulders in a vain attempt to puff himself up, “but I don’t have to incriminate myself, either.”

Nanuq scoffed and took a step toward me. “You can’t even admit when you’ve been caught? You were going to use this marriage as a pretext to absorb our tribe, weren’t you?”

“I’m not going to entertain the wild notions of some Tayagun mongrel trying to play politics—”

I burned the map in my hand and grabbed the chief’s collar, pulling him up until his feet were starting to leave the floor. The air grew warm, and the walls began to weep droplets of water. “I’ll speak plainly, since you won’t. If you insult my husband again, or the Shui so much as set foot in his tribe, you and your people will sorely regret it.”

Yun had an eyebrow up, to say nothing of the questioning looks from everyone else. I dropped Anyu, and he stumbled out of the room with one hand held over his throat. Sanara followed, reluctantly, after one pained look at Tiaraq that he turned away from. The air cooled again, and I sat back on the bed. “I doubt they’ll be willing to oversee my accession now,” I said, and tucked some hair behind my ear. “We ought to get going, we can sleep on Bima.”

“Can I get a ride back to a Chikyan port?” Tiaraq asked. I nodded. “Oh, I’m not looking forward to dealing with my mother over this…guess the wedding’s off, at any rate.”

Nanuq seemed to snap back into coherence at that, and my stomach tied itself in a knot while we went about packing. “Not to poke at the elephant rhino in the room, but…husband?” Nanuq asked, with more than a trace of optimism in his voice.

Yun flinched, and Rei and Tiaraq took the opportunity to slip out of the room. Sure, leave me to deal with it. Not like they were supposed to be older and wiser than me. “It sounded more official than calling you my consort, and we were already dealing with weddings and marriages and—slip of the tongue, that’s all. You both know I do my best to treat you equally, don’t you?”

They nodded, and I had to keep from sighing in relief. We didn’t need an argument like that right before being stuck in a saddle together for days on end. Although, barring any unfortunate circumstances, it was probably a conversation that was going to come up eventually…no, I wasn’t going to take time to think about that just then. I was supposed to be indignant and storming out of the palace, not daydreaming about marriage.

Once we were packed and Rei and Tiaraq had returned with their things, Yun tapped my arm. “Do you want, I mean—what about that?”

She pointed back to the bed, at my hand. Oh. Right. It still wasn’t quite processing, not having it attached to my wrist. The feeling was almost like a dream, nearly reality but for a few oddities. I went back, wrapped it up in some spare bandages, and tucked it away. “I’ll toss it once we’re out over the water. Don’t want anyone trying to sell it or do something weird.”

The rest of the tribe gave us a much warmer sendoff than the chief, and by the time we had gotten to Bima at the docks we were loaded down with food, blankets, even some money. Yun’s half-siblings from the day before nearly piled onto her at the harbor, stuffing her arms with supplies until she was ready to buckle from the weight. We had to carry it into the saddle while she went around and promised to write to all of them, and by then Bima was groaning about the ice under her paws.

“You know, I’m getting a little tired of running around from place to place,” I said once we were in the air, on a steady enough course for Yun to climb back into the saddle for a short rest. “It seems like as soon as we get to where we’re going, we’ve got to pack up and move on again.”

“What did you have in mind?” Nanuq asked as he settled in beside me at the back of the saddle.

“A place to come back to. Something steady so we’re not always depending on someone else’s good graces. A home.”

“That sounds nice,” Yun said as she shuffled back toward us, grabbing Rei in lieu of a blanket. She certainly gave off enough warmth. Tiaraq sat cautiously on her other side until she pulled him closer.

The four of them nodded off eventually, and I had a quiet moment to roll my sleeve back and look at the damage, at the new round, abrupt end of my arm at the wrist. I touched at the new skin, wincing at the rawness of the sensation from my fingers and the cold wind. Suddenly I was aware again of the scars under my face paint, of the hair I’d shorn off. My eyes burned and tears stained my sleeve while I wondered what else being the Avatar was going to cost me.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading so far!
> 
> Are you enjoying _Kyoshi: Swan Song_? You may also enjoy my other stories:
> 
> [No Gods, No Masters](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3721117) \- What if the Red Lotus managed to kidnap an infant Korra? (Finished!)  
> [Prompt Madness](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5181146) \- All the drabble prompts I get on [my tumblr](http://fell-dragon-domain.tumblr.com/) in one simple document.  
> [Izumi Week 2016](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6553468) \- Prompts for the best Fire Lord ever.  
> [Burn It Out](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6463846) \- A oneshot gift for [HenryMercury](http://archiveofourown.org/users/HenryMercury) about Korra meeting a different old lady in Book 4.


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